Jacob hadn’t read those ancient letters in years, but he knew the name of the epic hero of the Odyssey when he saw it. Odysseus. There had been a time in his life when he’d been able to recite whole sections of it from memory (Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course), usually while quite drunk at the sort of jugular parties that nobody ever threw anymore. Four semesters of Attic Greek, studying crumbling dusty books in forgotten corners of the library, translating words that had been translated a million times before. Words that were meaningless claptrap to everyone else in his universe, as if poetry alone weren’t a dead-enough, lost-enough language. Sometimes it seemed as if he’d spent twenty-some years working his ass off to ensure he’d have practically nothing in common with anyone.
“Jacob?” The lights came buzzing on as Sissy Coltrane blew into the room.
“Hey there,” he said with a forced wave, well aware that he was holding Ella’s mug awkwardly in his other hand.
“Looking for something?”
“Pencils,” Jacob blurted out. “We’re all out. Over in the lounge. Dr. Boujedra said I should come in here to see if you had any extra.”
Sissy fished around in a drawer until she produced a fistful of pencils. “Oliver’s usually so good at keeping the supplies on order,” she said. “That’s Ella’s mug there. She’s got quite an eye. Smart, too. Oliver told me she got some kind of Presidential Scholarship last year, right before she came back.”
She had called Oliver “Oliver” twice now.
“What’s her deal?” Jacob asked, while Sissy crossed to a refrigerator in the corner where she kept open paint jars. She pulled out a brown paper bag with a greasy spot on one side. “She’s so smiley most of the time. You sure she’s not kind of coo-coo?”
Sissy pulled out a fat, cold egg roll. “Jacob, you know I can’t discuss that kind of thing.”
Jacob rolled his eyes. As if she and “Oliver” and Paul and everyone else didn’t spend half their lives gossiping about which patients saw chartreuse elephants and which had been arrested for pulling the emergency brakes on the subway and which had been found naked on the roof, covered in glue and feathers torn from pillows, trying to fly to Mars.
“Not such a strange case. We’ve tried all kinds of medications, but she still becomes severely depressed by the strangest things. Oliver described it really well the other day — what did he call it? Oh yes, he said it’s like a hypersensitivity. An ‘extreme adjustment disorder.’ Like an acute stress disorder, only the stressors aren’t unreasonable or unidentifiable things.”
“So they’re just—actually stressful?” He hated the way she kept saying “we.”
“Yes, but not stressful to the extent that she experiences them. For instance, going into a deep depressive funk for weeks because — I don’t know, a houseplant dies. Or she saw a Christian Children’s Fund commercial on TV. Those ones with Sally Struthers?”
“Finding Sally Struthers depressing is cause for rehabilitation?”
Sissy eyed him warily. “Well, yes. If you can’t get out of bed for three days afterward. You or me, we’d feel bad for a minute, maybe two, and we’d move on. With Ella? Well, you know what brought her back here this time, after doing terrifically for six months without trouble? She saw one of those St. Jude’s posters on a bus. You know, with the little bald chemo children? Apparently she just lost it. Began weeping and didn’t stop for two days, even after her boyfriend drove her back up here.”
Jacob hoped his eyes hadn’t widened too much on the word boyfriend.
“So how long before she goes home?”
Sissy set her egg roll down and pulled out a white carton full of lo mein. Then she snapped apart a pair of chopsticks, and then to get the stray splinters of wood off, she rubbed them against each other like a Cub Scout trying to start a fire.
“You know how it works. She can stay here until someone stops paying for it. Or until she’s ready for the world, I guess.”
“Who’s ever ready for it?”
Sissy looked exasperated, its own reward. “Why are you so interested?”
“I’m not really. Just, she talked to me the other day, and she seemed — I don’t know — she seemed fine. Made me wonder what she’s doing here is all. Hey, where’d you order from?”
“Pardon?”
“Is that from Szechuan Garden, in Stamford?”
She looked down at her half-chewed roll. Jacob glanced at the colorful assortment of cabbage and carrot inside, and the smooth brown spiraling of the wrapper.
“Stamford? No. Of course not. I live in Katonah,” she said. “I don’t know. I just order off the menu on my fridge. Hunan Palace? Dynasty Pagoda? I can’t remember.”
MAY
Then one day Ella was gone. Not in Feingold’s group and not in art therapy. Not lining up for decaf coffee at seven on the dot. Jacob overheard a despondent Maura mumbling to another girl that Ella’s parents had come over the weekend to pick her up and take her on a Wonderland Cruise for two weeks before going back to start the summer session at Columbia. Her mug was gone from the rack, though “Self-Portrait in Gray” still hung on the wall in the common room — left behind, perhaps overlooked in her rush to get back to her real life. He liked to think she’d left it there for him. A way of saying thank you. Goodbye.
“There, there,” Paul said, when he saw Jacob moping over his roast beef sandwich, “plenty of other crazy fish in the sea.”
Jacob wanted to lay into him — tell him that for one thing he was gay, and for another not everything always had to be about sex, despite what The Real World: San Diego and the CW’s Vampire Hookups might suggest. Not everyone was so lonely and desperate that they leaped into bed with the first willing partner. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and sometimes a skyscraper was just an efficient way of arranging offices given limited surface area. But Jacob barely mustered a good eye roll before heading off to eat his lunch in the bathroom again.
He hadn’t meant to look Ella up on Facebook. He didn’t even have a Facebook account. He felt this was important to stress. When he had to — when he really had to — he used Irene’s account, which she had hardly used herself, never even bothering to upload a profile picture, so that now it displayed just a ghostly outline of a woman’s head. She had given him her password, and he used it only in cases of emergency. As he looked at messages for her, he wondered who else might have been there. Then he thought of Ella and couldn’t remember — was it York or Yorke? So he’d tried typing it out, there in the little search bar—Ella York… no, no… Ella Yorke. Yes. That was it. And without thinking, he emphatically hit the enter key.
And there she was. Smiling like a girl in a toothpaste commercial, in a blue high school graduation gown. Eating tacos in a college cafeteria with a couple other girls. Unwrapping a present in front of a fake Christmas tree. Eating mozzarella sticks in Washington Square Park with a girlfriend, wearing churchgoing hats at a Salvation Army. He realized what a difference just a few years made. Facebook, the Internet, all this had been a part of her youth, while for him, now, it hardly existed. He paused on a picture of her wearing a cranberry prom dress and pinning a corsage onto the tuxedo lapel of an earnest-looking young man — when he hovered the pointer over the boy’s face, his name popped up, unrequested. Francis U. Williams. Francis and Ella. Then Jacob signed off, almost immediately. It had been only a tiny, accidental lapse in professionalism.