“That depends where you live,” said Leah.
“True,” smiled Dinah. “Harriet told me she met Lew when she was living in your house in Italy.”
Leah cocked her head a little, and eyed Dinah. “Lew was just a kid. A skinny twenty-year-old. He wasn’t interested in Harriet then. That came later.” She took a strawberry and ate it slowly, not taking her eyes off Dinah. “He had to be convinced, you know.”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“She’s the one who went after him.”
“Harriet?”
“Don’t be fooled. She seems featherbrained but she’s hard as flint. A sore loser too. Oh, yes. We’d be playing Scrabble and she’d get
angry
. Remember, Jack? She’d make up words and insist they were real.”
“Good for her,” laughed Dinah.
“She hates to lose,” said Jack. “She’s too competitive.”
Dinah said, “I wouldn’t have said so. I don’t find her so.”
“She’s more competitive than Lew,” Jack said. “But then Lew’s not good enough for her.”
Dinah stared at him, a strawberry halfway to her mouth. What sort of talk was this? What sort of mean, muddled thinking? For a moment she felt like her mother when she’d been given by her future mother-in-law a badly tangled hairnet to untangle, as a test. Once she’d untangled it, and it took her an hour, her mother-in-law decided that she would do. Ida was suitable to marry her David. But how to untangle all of these personal threads? Apparently, Jack was jealous of Lew. But on Harriet’s account? Or on my account? she wondered. Had Leah told him Lew was in love with her? As she’d told Harriet?
She said, “I can’t believe you would say that Lew isn’t good enough for her.”
“Why are you so interested in Lew?” asked Jack.
“I’m interested in both of them. They’re my friends.”
“Be interested in me instead,” said Jack.
“Okay.” And she took one of the strawberries and said, “Open wide.”
Her mother wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later. Dinah told her about her plans for dinner and about Leah’s room at the hotel. They would go over to Harriet and Lew’s first, then go on from there. Jack, who had other plans, would get a ride with them to his apartment, and they would continue on to the Château. “I’m sure you would be welcome too.” But Ida wasn’t interested. The food at the Château gave her heartburn, she said. No, she would stay here and keep Buddy company.
Lew was at the piano when they trooped into the house half an hour later. He was playing Gershwin songs, and immediately Jack grabbed Harriet by the hand and began to dance her around the living room. He was surprisingly light on his feet, propelling her so firmly that when she sank into the sofa afterwards she was laughing with delight. “Louise Brooks said Fatty Arbuckle was a wonderful dancer,” she said. “It was like floating in the arms of a huge donut.”
“Thanks,” said Jack.
“You’re not a donut,” she laughed. “Unless you’re Fatty Arbuckle.”
“What’s this? You’re calling me Fatty Arbuckle? Yes or no?”
“If you’re Fatty Arbuckle, then I’m Ginger Rogers.”
Lew, seated at the piano, said, “I think Ginger is safe,” and Harriet felt the remark enter her like a needle.
“What
are yes
and
no
, anyway?” asked Jane, who had been reading on the loveseat. “They’re not adjectives. They’re not nouns. They’re not verbs. What are they?”
“Adverbs,” said Harriet. “Believe it or not, they’re adverbs.” And she stood up and headed for the kitchen.
Lew said, “No, they’re not. They can’t be adverbs.”
Harriet stopped and stared at him. Then she went into his study, got the dictionary, returned and opened it.
“Yes
is a contraction
of yea, be it so
, and the dictionary says it’s an adverb.
No
is a contraction of
not ever
. Also an adverb.” She slammed the book shut.
Dear Pauline
, she said to herself,
Love only goes so far, even among people who are supposedly fond of you. Remember that. H
.
In her mind she accused Lew of intentional mild malice. He would deny it, of course. He always denied being a shit when she
accused him of being a shit. She just wanted him to admit that, yes, every so often he was a shit. But he wouldn’t.
And so, when it came time to go to the Château Laurier, she was in no hurry to leave the house. Everyone else was in the car – Lew, Aunt Leah, the kids. Dinah would take her own car and drop Jack at his apartment, then join them in the restaurant. But Harriet was still fishing for her keys. As she was about to step out the door, she turned around for a last look and found herself held by the dark, still interior. The quietness drew her back inside and back in time to the blessed, creative, early-morning hours in university when she wrote poetry before her lectures began. The lovely surprised excitement of writing, and of reading afterwards what she had written, amazed that something was there.
Lew came to the door to get her. “We’re ready to go,” he said.
“I think I’ll stay.”
“Don’t be like that. Come on. We’ll have fun.”
“No, we won’t.” Her pale, exhausted face hovered in the dim hallway.
“We’ll have a nice warm room and you’ll sleep.”
“No,” she said, “I won’t.”
“Hattie,” he pleaded.
“I’m sick to death of the lot of you,” she said.
The freezing darkness stole around her. She curled up on the sofa, under a blanket. A childish mistake. Lying here on her ice floe, not even knowing what day it was. It was Friday, and outside it began to snow.
An hour or two passed. She was thinking about Garbo stepping onto the private raft she called Harriet Brown. Better,
perhaps, to be Garbo-in-reverse: Harriet Browning for the first half of her life, someone vividly different for the second half. I’ve reached the outer limits of my personality, she thought with sudden clarity. It’s time to leap onto another ice floe and push out to sea. To find some new territory – an archipelago, or an island – to explore. The thought came with a strange pain in her heart, and an image of Lew fading into the distance, receding into an icy expanse.
When the phone rang, she was almost too stiff to get up and answer it.
The sleep clinic had a cancellation. Come in tonight, they said. Be here by eight o’clock. What time is it now? she asked, since it was too dark to see her watch. A quarter to eight, they said. Before leaving she lit a candle, found the phone number for the hotel, left a message for Lew about her whereabouts, blew the candle out.
H
arriet sat in her long grey nightie with thick socks on her feet, while a young man named Danilo attached fifteen electrodes to her forehead, around her chin, under her eyes, behind her ears, on the back of her head, on her shoulders, and on the muscles just below her knees. She said she was surprised they were
operating the clinic this week, and he told her they’d had to close on Wednesday. Nobody could get here.
Most of their clientele, he said, were obese men. Even being twenty pounds overweight was enough to cause snoring or sleep apnea. It’s the extra weight carried on the neck that does it, he said, and the way it restricts the breathing cavities. Their wives send them, he told her knowingly, and for her benefit, she thought, since she was interested and amused. They’d never come on their own, he said, because it’s considered sissy. “Not too many women come,” he added. When she asked him why he said he wasn’t sure, but he suspected that women learn how to get by without much sleep. He said, “They don’t complain or whine as much as men.”
Small and slender, this Danilo, with glasses and a soft beard. Brown skin. Gentle hands. He didn’t do this all the time – he was getting his Ph.D. – but this was a way to earn money. She felt the need to explain why she was one of the few women who complained – or whined – and to apologize somewhat, since she had no great physical affliction. She said, “I’ve been thinking about coming to a sleep clinic for years. I’ve had trouble sleeping since I was twelve.”
Look at me, Danny, she wanted to say, look at these tired eyes. Instead, she asked him what his Ph.D. was about. Neuroscience, he replied. He worked with rats. Just their brains, and so the rats, unfortunately, had to be killed. Their brains are kept alive in a solution, he said, then triggered with certain stimuli to measure their responses. It’s to further the work on human deafness.
“Do you kill the rats yourself?”
“I do.”
“How?” she asked.
“You decapitate them.”
“With a knife?”
“With scissors,” he said. “They’re made for the job. They’re big and very sharp. You just cut through the neck – it’s quick and painless. If you have an old rat with a tough neck then you anaesthetize it so it doesn’t feel any pain. It’s done very carefully. We’re not allowed to cause pain. And it’s for science,” he added.
They were in a small equipment-filled room on the first floor of the west wing of the hospital. She was positioned so that she faced a small black-and-white TV and various charts of the human body. As Danilo hooked up her legs, giving the spot below the knee a close shave, she pointed at the big sleep chart on the wall behind him. “The six stages of sleep?” she asked, because the chart was divided into six sections with a different pattern, of what she assumed were brain waves, drawn in each one.
“Five stages,” he said.
“What’s the sixth? Death?”
And he laughed and looked over at the chart, and explained that the six stages included a pre-sleep stage, characterized by fast-frequency alpha waves in the brain.
On her left was the open door to the cubicle where she would sleep, a nun-like room with a narrow bed and two chairs. Behind her was a second sleeping cubicle. In that one the other client was being hooked up: she heard the voice of Danilo’s colleague explaining as he went along, and she imagined the obese chest and belly of the man at his mercy. She didn’t imagine that she knew him, but she did. When he came out, in briefs and a T-shirt, it was the song detective.
He had his knitting in a cloth bag, the needles stuck out the top.
“I’m your neighbour,” she told him as he blinked at her. “In the house beside Bill Bender. The one with the big verandah.”
He was thickset, but not obese by any means. Lived-in face, unruly hair, craggy brow, dry lips. A bit like Badger, she thought. A Rosanno Brazzi of field and den.
“Is it the neighbourhood?” he asked. “As far as I can make out, nobody sleeps.”
Gingerly, so as not to dislodge any of the electrodes, he took a chair near Harriet, who said, “Dinah told me you were a knitter.”
“Did she?” Sudden interest in his face. “What else did she say?”
“Oh, she’s very discreet, which is unusual for a reporter.”
“She is unusual.” His radio voice – she recognized it – was as deeply appreciative as when he talked about Deanna Durbin: “A better voice than Judy Garland, and she’s still with us, she’s living in France.”
“You’ve known her for a while?”
“We knew somebody in common,” he said. “I heard a lot about her before I met her.”
“And when was that?”
“The first time? About fifteen years ago, when she came up north to write some articles. Then two years ago, when she moved into the neighbourhood. Two years ago last November,” he said.
He fished his glasses out of the cloth bag, and then his knitting, set the glasses on the end of his nose, and began to sort out needles and wool.
“My mother knits in the car,” she told him. “When she isn’t filing her nails.”
“It’s for Dinah,” he said simply. And the crackle of romance filled the air.
It was warm, almost cozy, in this small room filled to the brim with functioning electronics, while outside trees and wires and pylons crumpled in the fields. Danilo and his colleague fiddled with knobs. Harriet, in her flannel nightie, kept up her questions. “So when did
your
sleeping troubles begin?” she asked him.
“You want the history? Ten years ago when I gave up drinking to please a woman who left me anyway.”
“Was her name by any chance Stella?”
A rumpled grin. He looked over his glasses – just like Sean Connery, she thought, in
The Russia House –
at this inquisitive woman with the dramatically tired eyes.
His lips, she noticed, were not only dry but freckled.
He was counting stitches. “Fifty-nine,” he said aloud.
Then he put down his knitting, and asked her what she knew about Dinah’s cancer. She told him what she knew: since they’d drained the fluid off her lungs she was feeling remarkably well, surprising herself and her doctors, but there would be an operation. Probably at the end of January.
A young doctor came in. Friendly. Mop of brown hair. “Are they taping you up?” he asked as they sat there, taped up.
“She doesn’t take care of herself,” he said after the doctor left. “Reporters never do.”
“Well, she’s got an idea for a new career. I’m her test plot.” Harriet rubbed the left side of her face. “I had to stop using her lotion because this side of my face was starting to look like W.H. Auden.”
Then Danilo told them it was time for bed. They said good night to each other, and wished each other luck.
The sleeping cubicles were soundproofed, the beds rather high. Harriet removed the two pillows and used the one she had brought from home. The young doctor came in again and with many smiles talked about her sleeping trouble as outlined in the questionnaire she had filled out months ago. “I know what I should do,” she said. “I shouldn’t eat rich dinners or get stimulated by company. I should have a sign on my door that says, No Guests.”
“A lot of shoulds,” he said. “Are you a controlling personality? Everything has to be just so?”
“Well, I’m not interested in controlling anybody else.”
“Obsessive,” he said, and wrote it down on his chart.
He left her and went to the other cubicle, where he questioned the song detective. Harriet heard their voices, but the words were indistinct.
Danilo came in and made some further adjustments to the electrode on the back of her head, then asked her how sleepy she felt on a scale of one to eight. She said, “Seven, I think. Or maybe five.” She felt somewhere between pleasantly sleepy and wakefully sleepy. Once again she had been up since four, and she was very tired.