Jason wrote from L.A., and oh, could he write. His letters arrived almost daily through a slot in the front door, and his words balled up her insides until she stopped reading them. So he called. He told her about his fellow workers at the ketchup factory, making fun of them with a fondness that reminded her about the bigness of his heart. He engaged her in the furies of his creative struggles, made her laugh.
During the day she worked in an office, busying herself with the futile task of organizing other people's chaos. She missed Jason, the intimacy. His phone calls, when she took them, had the safety of distance behind them. She felt free to fantasize again, to imagine a closeness between them, to wonder about a future. But on the foggy summer nights, it was Tom, sipping Scotch out of thin glass, who radiated like a heater and drew her closer. Only the rude blare of the telephone could upset the peace when they would sit together at the table playing cards or trading jokes.
“You going to answer that?” Tom would ask.
Sometimes she answered, sometimes not. Always these calls from Jason were awkward because Tom sat there sipping or snacking, his warm, brown eyes fixed elsewhere, but every molecule of his body spinning in her direction.
One night in August, Tom went to a party with an old friend, a social worker named Peggy with muscular legs and a wide smile. Victoria spent the evening fussing, due to return to school in September, to L.A. Did that mean she returned to Jason, too? What about Tom? Tom's absence from the kitchen made her cranky, and when Luther came in to pour himself a little gin, not even drunk yet, she said nastily, “Oh, why bother with a glass when you can take the whole bottle?”
When Tom came home, late, she was waiting for him in the kitchen surrounded by the dirty dishes and cockroaches that had crept out, unafraid of the still, fuming woman at the table.
Tom lounged against the table, bubbling a little, as if the alcohol slogging inside him continued to brew. Ordinarily shy and wary around her, he reached a long arm out to snag her, pulling her close. Sniffing her hair, he said, “Ah. I knew you would smell just like this.”
Maybe if she hadn't been so jealous of Peggy, maybe if her nightly phone joust with Jason hadn't left her angry at herself for leading him on when she suddenly did not want a future with him and dreaded leaving San Francisco and the life she now led, she would have pushed Tom away. She valued their friendship. She did not want to jeopardize that by jumping into bed with him.
But the charged bolts of energy sizzled around them and she couldn't let go.
That first night, she let Tom hold her close.
The next night, they made love in his moody blue room, with the windows open and the cold night air seeping around and between the heat of their bodies, and she was hooked. All feeling for Jason faded into memory, into embarrassment. How could she have loved him? Examining the picture he had sent in a frame, she realized Carol had been right.
He was sleazy. He had little piggy eyes, and he had cheated on her and lied to her face.
The next time Jason called, she told him she didn't want him to call again. Frantic at her rejection, he stepped up his campaign, sending flowers, even a telegram. I LOVE YOU STOP
When she stopped responding, he had flown up. “I'm coming over…”
Life moves. That's the essence of it, force forward into progress, like mad lines of ants marching along, individual, mobbed, compelled. Yet, at that moment, while Jason's gun glinted in the corner of the attic room, and Tom moved out from beneath her, nothing progressed. Stalled, frozen, paralyzed, all these words did not do what happened justice. An eternal moment passed. She had time to assess the fundamental nature of the situation.
Jealousy.
Two men, one woman.
Elemental and immutable.
In her naiveté, she had not understood completely that they were not playing. These romances constituted the essential nature of life. Childhood was over. Adulthood was life itself, happiness, children. There were no higher stakes.
The gun glinting, as Jason raised it…
When she was very young, very very young, she played with dolls. She invented worlds where men were not necessary, where the characters reproduced asexually. They lived on the moon, powerful and unchallenged.
What happened in real life: staring at a gun. Something over for good. Accepting it.
“Aaaa!” she cried, then repeated herself. Jason's hand quavered. He stared at them. Blood bloomed on the chest of the man she loved.
“My fault?” she wondered, staring into the black hole of the barrel Jason now pointed at her. Everything on this warm, wild earth froze.
His hand wavered and his piggy eyes fixed. He brought the gun back, opened his mouth, and shot red all over the blue wall behind him. He slumped down on the rug, leaving behind two dead bodies and one living.
During the time their lives passed from active to inactive, she hesitated like a bee above a flower. Something was pending, something always hovered, and it was her life, lingering.
They died, they both died, and she stayed on to fly around in the sunshine and ponder that moment for the rest of her short days.
The Second Head
Neurons splintered, shrapnel flew, bombs exploded. She woke up in the middle of a war, only the war was not happening outside. The war was happening inside her body. Cells died, screaming as they went down. Reinforcements crept out of ditches and met resistance. All around, flashes of light and noise…
They wheeled her out of the operation.
“Pain. Pain. Pain,” she said. She had no idea if these words were a murmur or a scream. She opened her eyes to a blur of people in hallways and an elevator. “Pain,” she told them. “Pain,” she tattled to anyone that passed.
Hours later, she saw her husband. “How are you?” he asked.
“In pain.” Her voice came out as a croak. Oxygen flowed into her nose through tubes. Another tube ran through her right nostril and straight down into her stomach, draining any liquid she took in and scratching the back of her throat. He gave her ice chips to roll around in the dry world of her mouth when she needed them and the clear tube bubbled them out to a machine on her right side. She watched the moisture move out.
She made the decision early to use every bit of pain medicine that came her way. They hooked an IV up next to her bed and placed a button in her hand that would give her a dose every five minutes. Every time she thought of it, whether or not five minutes had passed, she pushed the button. The drug did little to disrupt the skirmishes inside of her. Instead it made her not care. In one druggy dream, she saw earnest people in white clustered around a conference table. “Do we numb the hurt or make the patient not give a shit about it?”
They had chosen to attack her spirit.
Her bed, a white-sheeted machine that contorted into any shape, was her foxhole. A remote control twined over the silver side rails hovered near her right hand. If she wanted to sit higher, she pushed the top right button. To rotate the entire machine, she pushed the third button from the bottom. She learned the sequence for how to sit up. First, second button on the left until the bed stopped. This button brought the bed down close to the ground. Then, the third button on the left until the bed stopped. This rotated the bed up until she was practically sliding out of it. She played with the first on the right and fourth on the left throughout, adjusting the head- and footrests, then sat, sweating, heart beating, sutures weeping, until she gathered the energy to grasp the side rails, spread her legs apart, and heave herself upright.