This is hard to explain. I knew what had happened to him—I was never far from the sight of it, especially compared to his mother, who at times seemed to keep the neck injury in a different compartment of her mind from the head injury, as if all he had to do was regain consciousness and then he’d be all right. But the idea of that place on his back opened up the whole geography of his body to me, and I felt physically bereft all at once, as if my body were only now catching up with my mind and understanding all it had lost. If he woke, how would he bear it? The diminishment, the dependence. How would he stand it? It was almost more daunting to consider that prospect than its opposite, that he wouldn’t wake; wouldn’t become, as the doctors put it, responsive again. But if he did, what about me? Would I become responsive again, too? Could I?
Early the previous summer, to celebrate graduating from college, we had gone to Chicago for a weekend, excited less because we’d finished school than because we were moving forward, taking a step: Mike’s job at the bank would start when we got back, and I had the library until I knew what else I might want to do.
The hotel elevator was lined with smoky mirrors and we rode up looking at our reflections, Mike’s arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist, two of my fingers tucked into his change pocket. The car clanked to a stop, and just before we got off Mike took a last glance at the mirror and said, “That guy’s got it made.” I didn’t know it, but he had bought me an engagement ring the day before and carefully tucked it into his suitcase.
A sign pointed us down the hall, and we made our way to our room. The key was on a bulky plastic tag, and Mike fitted it into the lock and turned it until the door swung open. Inside, we saw the foot of the bed, and beyond that a window with filmy white curtains half-drawn across it. We stood there for a moment, and then—simultaneously, both of us
acting at once—we turned toward one another, I lifted my arms, and Mike scooped me up and stepped over the threshold.
How does love change? How is it that I remember that day so clearly, Mike’s smile as he dumped me on the bed, the little gray box that held the ring, even the peanuts we ate from the tray on top of the TV, never guessing we’d be charged four dollars for them? How is it that I can trace a line through eight years from one happy day to another but can’t locate with any accuracy at all what happened to me next? A slow draining away of my feelings for him, a trickle I hardly noticed at first until the level was so low it was all I could notice, until what remained was dark and murky and it seemed that in no time at all I’d be bone-dry. We’d had dim times before, of course, but with quick, bright rescues: college and the notion of adulthood; my apartment and actually
sleeping
together, learning that that was something in itself, ultimately the most prized. In the months before the accident there was no rescue in sight. I couldn’t decide if I
wanted
a rescue. On bad days it was as if I were looking through cold glass at the two of us together while with some kind of remote control I operated my body and my voice. On good days I did my best to ignore myself.
But Mike could tell—I knew he could tell. And sitting there in my apartment, unable to start on my mother’s curtains, I desperately longed to undo so many things: my turning away from him; his awareness of it; his hurt and his pain; his fruitless efforts to woo me back. More than anything, I wanted to eradicate that final fruitless effort, the idea for which had overtaken him on the pier: that a playful gesture on his part, half foolhardy and half brave, could wake me to the old feelings at last.
C
HAPTER
5
Viktor and Ania lived on the other side of the isthmus from me, near Lake Monona, on the second floor of a big pink stucco house that had been divided into apartments. I parked under a sycamore and left my windows open against the hot evening. Next door, an oscillating sprinkler clicked tighter and tighter and then spun out, throwing water in an arc across a wide lawn. I could smell someone’s compost, the green, fertile scent of it.
All week at work Viktor had raved about the meal he and Ania were going to make for me and the fun we were going to have, but he’d never mentioned other guests, so I was surprised to see the table set for six. I felt uneasy, thinking dinner was one thing, a dinner party something else entirely. How could I be at a dinner party when Mike was in the hospital? Why wasn’t I at the hospital with him? Why wasn’t
I
the injured one,
he
the visitor? A panicky feeling rose in me, and I fought to quell it. I forced myself to smile at Viktor. “Who else is coming?”
“Carrie, you can’t imagine.” He shook his head mournfully. “Downstairs lives Tom, our neighbor, and we asked him to come, too. Now he has called us one hour ago to say his brother from New York is arriving tonight with a friend, and would we allow them as well? Of course I had to say yes.” He raised his hands dramatically. “Tell me now, how is this called, is it called bold? Very bold?”
“It’s pretty bold, all right. Forward, even.”
“Forward, yes! You can’t imagine Ania, she is quite put out.”
“I am not quite put out,” Ania called from the kitchen. I heard a thunk, as of an onion being split, and a moment later she came in, brushing furiously at her eyes. She was tall and broad-faced, the perfect match for him. “I am not quite put out and I am not crying—it’s onion tears is all. Hello, Carrie. Viktor, you don’t give her a drink?”
“I do,” he said. “I do give her a drink.”
“Give her one then. And she should sit in the rocking chair so she can see the lake out the window.”
Tom turned out to be someone I’d seen on campus a number of times. He would have been hard to miss: tall and skinny, with a headful of unruly blond curls. He was in physics, working toward what he called “a degree so terminal few survive it.” His brother looked like a toned-down Tom: not quite so tall, hair shading toward brown, someone whom it wouldn’t have been hard to miss.
Tom and his brother were trailed by the brother’s friend, a small, wiry guy in jeans and a gray T-shirt. His hands in his back pockets, he hung back a little, stayed quiet through the introductions. He was called Kilroy, though I didn’t catch if that was his first or last name.
“So you’re what, Czech?” he said to Viktor. Ania had returned to the kitchen, and the four guys were all still standing. Perched on the rocking chair, I wished they’d sit.
Viktor’s jaw tightened. “I’m Polish,” he said. Kilroy raised his eyebrows, and Viktor glanced at me, perplexed, then turned back. “You don’t like Polish?”
“I ‘like Polish’ fine,” Kilroy said. “It’s just that I saw your name on the mailbox downstairs, so it didn’t make sense.”
Viktor looked offended. “Why not?”
“Because it would be Viktor with a W, wouldn’t it? In Polish?”
Viktor colored slightly. “A linguist.”
“Wiktor!” Tom had been studying a picture over the fireplace, but now he turned, grinning. “It suits you, buddy. Think I’ll call you Wiktor from now on, what do you say?”
“Now you see why I have the spelling with a V,” Viktor said to Kilroy.
I stood up and went into the kitchen for another beer. If I’d wanted to hear a pair of guys needling each other I could have hung out with the people I usually hung out with. The evening stretched ahead of me, pointless and unending. The only thing I felt like doing lately was sewing, and how much could I sew? Already my closet was full of things I didn’t really need—things I didn’t even really want. I’d spent most of the day on
my mother’s curtains, cruising down the long seams. What would I make once they were finished?
Ania was grating cheese, and she paused for a moment to look up at me. “The men are sniffing each other?”
“Too bad they can’t just each pee in a corner and be done with it.”
Back in the living room I found them all still standing, Tom and his brother off to the side looking at a book, Viktor glowering down at Kilroy. When he saw me he muttered something, then went into the kitchen.
I looked at Kilroy. He was about my height, 5′6″, with a narrow, sharp-featured face and straggly brown hair.
He smiled. “I like your necklace.”
Instinctively I reached up to touch it. “Thanks.” It was just a silk cord that I’d strung with some odds and ends: a too-small ring and some old glass beads, plus a tiny seashell Mike had given me once. No one had ever commented on it before except Jamie, who’d said it looked like something someone’s little sister might have made in art class.
“Did you make it?” he said.
“That authentic-looking, huh?”
“No, I like it.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty.”
From the kitchen came the sound of Viktor and Ania talking in their own language, and after a moment Kilroy tilted his head in their direction and then raised his eyebrows at me. “Close friend of yours?”
“I just work with him.” I felt myself blush a little, denying a stronger connection in order to look good for this guy.
“Where?”
“At the UW library. What do you do? In New York, I mean.”
“I shoot pool.”
“No, really.”
“You don’t like pool?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing. Of course, it helps to have the right place to play. On Sixth Avenue right near my apartment there’s a bar called McClanahan’s with a pool table that’s got a tiny little gouge in the felt right near one of the side pockets, and I’m such an accomplished student of that table that I can just about always make the gouge work for me.”
He struck me as the kind of person who was always joking, who joked as a way of life, but still I said, “I meant, what do you do for work?”
He shook his head again. “Work is beside the point, as you’ll learn someday when you’re a little older.”
I blushed again. “I’m older than I look.” I lifted my beer and took a
long swig, which made me look about twelve. “See how well I can drink beer?”
He smiled, but he was watching me closely, and now he said, “You’re twenty-three, I’d say, give or take no more than a year. Right?”
I was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“You’re twenty-three, you’ve lived in Madison all your life. Let’s see—you’re engaged to marry your high school sweetheart, who couldn’t come tonight because he’s on a weekend fishing trip with his father.” He tilted his head. “How’d I do?”
My heart was speeding wildly, and I didn’t know what to say. Mike
could
have been on a weekend fishing trip with his father—it was something the two of them did once or twice a summer.
“Well?” Kilroy said.
“You weren’t entirely wrong or entirely right.”
He grinned. “I read minds, sideline to pool. So where’d I screw up—you’re not from Madison?”
“I am.”
“He’s your
college
sweetheart?”
“What makes you so sure I’m engaged?”
He pointed at his own ring finger.
“He’s both.”
“But I was right about everything else?”
Ania came into the room then, a huge steaming pot in her mitted hands, and behind her came Viktor, carrying a bowl of salad. They put the food on the dining table, then turned to face us.
“Almost everything else,” I said to Kilroy. “But not quite.”
What Kilroy said haunted me all evening long. I was wearing something fairly bland, pistachio-green linen pants and a white T-shirt, and I wondered how much that had guided him, how much the homemade necklace, how much the way I’d downed my beer. But what information could he really have gotten from any of that? How could he have known I was from Madison? Was there a never-left-home look about me? A never-left-home, never-moved-from-boyfriend-to-boyfriend, never-surprised-anyone look? In Viktor and Ania’s little bathroom between dinner and dessert, I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Dark hair, blue eyes, a longish neck that had embarrassed me once but that was fine now—enviable even, according to Jamie. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t figure out what Kilroy had seen.
The next morning I woke with a headache. I’d stuck with beer while everyone else had drunk Viktor’s Polish vodka, but I’d stuck with a little too much of it and I felt terrible. I drank a big glass of water before my shower and another after, and then it was time to go to Jamie’s.
We’d made up by then, which was a good thing, since she was throwing a going-away brunch for Christine that morning. Christine was moving to Boston for graduate school, and although it seemed wrong for us to gather without Mike, we had to observe the occasion somehow.
Moving to Boston. I envied her.
On my way over I picked up some flowers for Jamie—gerbera daisies, which she loved. I say we’d made up, but actually our answering machines had: she’d called and left a
Just wanted to say hi, talk to you later
kind of message on my machine; then I’d called and said the same kind of thing to her machine; and by the time we actually connected we were able to chat about nothing for ten minutes, just the amount of time we needed to spend on the phone in order to feel that everything was OK, by which point it was.
It was Sunday morning and Miffland was quiet, sleeping off Saturday night. Across the street from Jamie’s a shabby brown house had been extravagantly toilet-papered, streamers of it hanging from the peaked roof and festooning the maple tree in the front yard. I climbed the steps up to Jamie’s porch and knocked. The yellow house next door reminded me of the party I hadn’t gone to, of the guy Jamie’d been interested in.
“Fleurs!” she said when she opened the door. “Carrie, you doll.”
“You like them?”
“I love them, obviously. Come on, come in.”
She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then led me through the dining room, where the table was set with cloth napkins and a glass bowl of strawberries in the center. It was just like her to have everything ready, looking nice, and I felt a pang of regret. There’d been a time when I would have arrived early to help.
“It looks great in there, Jamie,” I said once we were in the kitchen. “Christine’ll be really happy.”