“I’ve been hurt. I’m still hurt, actually. Will you come visit me? There’s no one fun to talk to here.” Bob took a long lunch break, stopping for a bouquet of flowers on the way. When he arrived at the hospital he found Ethan abed, bored-looking but apparently healthy. When he made to sit up, though, he winced in what Bob took for significant pain. Bob pulled up a chair and asked what had happened. “The whole thing started,” Ethan said, “with Eileen’s mother, Georgie.”
Georgie, Ethan told Bob, was Eileen but twenty-five years older, and hardened by a life of lovelessness and languor. She could drink a bottle of champagne at brunch with never so much as a slur, she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and her pastime was viciousness, directed at her daughter in the morning hours and her husband after the sun set. Georgie endeavored to get Ethan off on his own and she succeeded without very much trouble at all, for she wore her age and vices well, and Ethan had not met a woman before who thought so little of telling him precisely what she wanted him to do. Georgie was a force, and she had style, and for a time these two were simpatico. “The other waiters got wind of my position and explained my good fortune to me. All I had to do was keep the husband in the dark and at season’s end I’d have a hundred-dollar tip and fond memories to boot. Fine, but there was Eileen, looking up at me as I poured her coffee, and I just had to engage with her. Georgie got wind of the budding friendship and made to head us off at the pass but it was too late, we’d already broke bread. Broken bread. The bread was in pieces.”
“So, the story you’re telling me,” Bob said, “is that you made love to your fiancée’s mother.”
“No, Georgie wasn’t my fiancée’s mother at the time of our entanglement. If we have to name a crime here, I guess you could say that I became engaged to the daughter of a woman I’d had an affair with.”
“So there was never any overlap?”
“That’s not a very friendly question, Bob. But yes, all right, preceding the engagement there was overlap, and yes, it became messy and complex. There was a lot of running around and ducking into closets, things like that. Each woman wore a strong perfume but not the same brand; I’ve never taken so many showers in my life. I managed to keep my relationship with Georgie hidden from Eileen and Eileen’s father but there were some very close shaves, and the stress level was high, and between the romantic cloak-and-dagger and the work schedule I wasn’t sleeping hardly at all. Around the same time Georgie and I started falling apart, Eileen and I became engaged. She told her folks and they packed up and dragged her to the airport. And that would have been that but for the fact of their living in Portland. Eileen’s folks had me fired, you see, and I was sent home, and so we all four were on the same flight back. When we landed, Eileen came away with me and we stayed in my apartment for however many weeks it took for me to figure out, you know, I could never marry this person.”
Bob said, “I didn’t understand the quickness of the engagement.”
“I was confused by that also.”
“So it was her idea?”
“If you want to get technical, it was my idea. But really, I had only meant it as that — an idea.”
“Something to discuss.”
“Something to bat around.”
“Something to chew on.”
“Put a pin in it, consider it later. But then she agreed with such — aggression. Anyway, yesterday was the day where I finally told her we’d have to call it all off.”
“And how did that go?”
“Bad, badly. Yelling and tears, cursing, the breaking of cups and plates, leaving, returning — she kept returning. Her point, and it was a fair point, was that she had already debased herself by agreeing to marry a waiter, ruining her standing. And then this same waiter breaks off the engagement? It’s a double ruining.” He shifted in his bed and again there was the look of pain.
Bob said, “I still don’t understand why you’re in the hospital?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Eileen tried to kill me.” He pulled down the collar of his hospital smock, revealing a stitched wound four or five inches below the left clavicle. “She stuck a steak knife in me while I was sleeping. We’d been fighting all afternoon and evening and I’d dozed off on the couch. When I woke up she was standing over me with a funny look on her face and her suitcase by her feet. ‘Where you going?’ Then I noticed the knife handle sticking out of my chest. Wait’ll you see the X-rays. The doctor says she missed the heart by millimeters.”
Bob sat considering this tale, and the way it existed in contrast to Ethan’s apparent amusement, when a nurse entered with a questioning face. “Are you behaving yourself?”
“Hello, Roberta. Yes, I am. Look, look at the flowers.”
“Oh, my goodness.” She saw Bob and asked, “Did your friend bring you flowers?”
“He sure did. What do you think about that?”
“I think that’s just nice. Let’s get them in some fresh water.” Roberta located a vase and filled it with water. She unwrapped the flowers and arranged them in the vase and set this down on the table at the foot of the bed. “I’ll leave them here so you can enjoy them.”
“Thank you, Roberta. Enjoying the flowers is important to me.”
Roberta was patting the flowers this and that way. “I’ll put some sugar in the water,” she said to Bob. “That makes the flowers stand up and say hello.” She left the room to seek the sugar out.
“Where was I in the story?” Ethan asked.
“You were lying there stabbed.”
“I was lying there, stabbed,” said Ethan. “And Eileen was gone and I just figured, okay, this is the end. But then time passed and I felt fine. A little bit tingly in the feet and hands, but otherwise all was as usual. I wasn’t about to take the knife out myself though, and I did crave the advice of a medical professional, so I put on my pants and slippers, no shirt, and went down to the pay phone on the corner. I made myself understood to the operator, then sat down in the booth and went to sleep, or maybe fainted, then I woke up here and the knife was gone and they won’t give it back to me and I think they lost it, actually. My one nice knife.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“I’m sore as hell and it’s uncomfortable to breathe but I didn’t die and I don’t have to get married. So, all things considered, I’m fine.”
“And where is Eileen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has she been arrested?”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to press charges or anything like that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think that would be very gentlemanly, do you?”
“I’m not sure there’s a precedent for such a thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t know that a gentleman would have found himself in the position in the first place.”
“Okay, touché. But that only leads to my next point. I’ve been lying in this bed thinking about my habits and behaviors, Bob. And it seems to me that I’ve been spoiling for a stabbing for a good little minute, here.”
Bob didn’t disagree, or he didn’t disagree strongly, and he let the statement alone. He asked Ethan, “So is this to be your new-leaf moment, and now you’ll become chaste and worthy?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe this is just my lot in life. But I can’t claim that the violence against me was unearned, and I’ve decided to take my medicine without any gripes.” In a summing-up tone of voice, he said, “I’m not malicious, but I am careless. I don’t know that I know how to change, or if I even want to, but I’m thinking about the kind of man I want to be for the first time in my life, so there’s your silver lining.”
Roberta returned with the sugar for the flowers and news that it was time for Bob to leave Ethan to his rest. Ethan said he didn’t need rest but Roberta disagreed. She told Bob, “You can come back tomorrow.”