Life After Yes (18 page)

 

I smile.

 

Phelps
: Room 547. Maybe I'll see you later when u lose the old man?

 

After billing a few more drinks to our clients, we stumble to the elevator, pulling two generations of suitcases behind us.

He walks me to my room and waits as I find my key. “Shall we have a nightcap?”

I look at him, the bloodshot eyes, the stray mustache hairs probably left over from a hasty morning shave.

“Better not,” he says, answering his own question, looking down. “Could be trouble.”

Before turning to go, he kisses me on the cheek. “Good night, Quinn. You're a good kid.” And he disappears down the long hallway, the nutty smell of cigar smoke trailing behind him.

Once he's gone, I retrace my steps. Back onto that elevator and press 5. I walk slowly, 553, 551, 549…547. I knock softly, as if this is any less of an action.

“I knew you'd come,” a voice says. And then he opens the door. And he's mere inches away, smiling like nothing ever happened.

“Still not lacking in the confidence department?”

“Guess not,” he says.

Silence.

He insists I come in for a drink, that we hardly got a chance to talk in January. Knowing I will blame everything on the cocktails, I enter.

Phelps heads straight for the minibar and fiddles with the little key. “It's one of those ones with a motion sensor that charges you for everything you touch,” he says. “The curse of technology.”

“Then don't touch,” I say, looking around the dark room.

But he already has a fistful of mini bottles and a Toblerone bar. “Nothing wrong with a late night snack,” he mumbles.

“Don't need the calories; I'm getting married soon,” I remind him.

“Screw calories. You look incredible,” he says, handing me a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a square of chocolate.

I look at the little bottle, start peeling away at the black label. “Who
is
this Jack Daniel? Wouldn't it be cool to have a drink named after you?”

“I know it would be delicious,” Phelps says, smiling. “But would it be The Prudence or The Quinn?”

Before I know it, most of the minibar contents are scattered between us on the beige bed; a tin of cashews, a jar of gummy bears, bottles of water and champagne.

Phelps feeds me a pretzel. And before I finish chewing, he's kissing me. And I'm kissing him back. He rolls on top of me, kicking bags and bottles to the carpet below.

And we're naked. This doesn't feel as wrong as it should because I've been here before. So many times. Like a memory. Like a dream.

But real.

“You still on the pill?” he has the prudence to mumble.

Before I have a chance to answer, his tongue is back in my mouth and it seems he's presumed a positive response to his romantic question.

When we're finished, we lie there like we always used to, toes touching, staring up at the ceiling. There's a crack running between the two overhead fixtures we never turned on.

“When is she due?”

“Any day,” he says, looking away.

“And here you are,” I say, looking at him, searching those eyes for sadness, for remorse, for love.

“Here I am,” he says.

“Good thing you inquired about the birth control situation. Did you ever think to ask her that one?”

“I do love her,” he says, and all I can think of is dying trees and lonely stalks.

“I'm sure you do. You don't have to justify it to me,” I say. “And I love him.”

“I'm sure you do. You don't have to justify it to me.”

“Why did you do it?” I ask. “You didn't have to marry her. It's practically in vogue these days to have a baby out of wedlock.”

He doesn't answer me. “Why'd you?” he asks.

“Why did I get engaged?”

“No,” he says. “Why did you leave?”

Why did I leave him? And I don't have a good answer for him. Or for myself. Perhaps because boredom settled like fog over our yuppie existence? Perhaps because it isn't prudent to waste time on a first love? Because we all know first loves don't last. Or do they?

“I don't know,” I say, and as I say it, I wonder if it is a copout, or simply the truth. But then I think of Mom, her wisdom that reasons often manifest after the fact, that the architecture of decisions is often only perceptible in retrospect. So I qualify these words. “I don't know
yet.
”

And then he asks me the question he's never asked: “Had you already met him?”

I look at him, at his pleading blue eyes, the scar above his lip where I snagged him on that fateful fishing trip.

“Do you want to know the answer to that?” I ask him.

“I guess I have it,” he says. He looks down and plays with his ring finger. No ring.

“Where's the ring?” I say.

“I wear it most of the time,” he says, still staring down, playing with that finger.

“Just not when sleeping with women who aren't your wife?” I say, climbing out of bed, shielding my naked body—the body he's seen countless times before, the body he's just consumed along with a mini fridge full of junk—with a filthy hotel bedsheet. “Might as well be a heart-shaped tub.”

He buries his head in his hands.

“The good husband,” I say.

He throws his legs over his side of the bed, facing away from me, collects his boxers from the carpet—Brooks Brothers, plaid, an old birthday gift from me—puts one leg through and then the other. “Yes, the good husband.”

There's nothing wrong with a late night snack.

But I fear that an ex is like that state-of-the-art minibar. No harm in looking. But if you touch, you'll have to pay.

I
open my eyes. Phelps sits next to me on the bed, staring. Like he always used to.

“You still sleep with your mouth open,” he says. “You look like a trout.”

“Trouble sleeping?” I ask.

“No. Best sleep I've gotten in years,” he says, standing, opening drapes. Summer sun slices in on us. “Hard to sleep through your pocketbook symphony though. That thing's been buzzing all morning.”

“Shit,” I say, checking my watch, scrambling for my things.

“Let me guess. Hot coffee date with the old man?”

“Something like that,” I say, escaping to the bathroom. The lights are harsh, highlighting every smudge and wrinkle. I splash cold water on my face. I scan the countertop and see the familiar lineup. Old Spice, shaving cream, Q-tips…Ro
gaine…I grab the bottle and take it out to him, smiling.

His cheeks turn pink and he grabs it from me. “She doesn't want me to be bald,” he explains.

“I wouldn't care if you were bald,” I say.

“I know,” he says, looking down. “That's the problem.”

When I leave his hotel room, he follows me out, onto that same elevator, a few floors down. He trails behind me as I find my own hotel room door, the one I never opened. And he walks me inside.

“You can go now,” I say, avoiding his eye, heading for the phone on the bedside that's blinking red.

He ignores me. “Your room's exactly the same,” he marvels, looking around.

“They're all the same,” I say. “They always are.”

As I dial down to the front desk, Phelps grabs my hand, squeezes hard, and whispers, “No regrets.”

“No regrets,” I say back. And wonder if I mean it.

And then he's gone.

A guy at the front desk answers, “Good morning, Ms. O'Malley. It seems there's been an incident.”

No shit.
For a moment I wonder how this clerk knows about my latest indiscretion.

“Mr. William Fisher was taken to a local hospital a few hours ago,” he says. “He asked that we contact you.”

I hang up. In the small bathroom, predictably blanketed in beige marble, I splash cold water on my face. And cry. And as I cry, I wonder why exactly I am crying. Is it because I have just ruined my future by dipping into my past? Is it because my boss has been hospitalized? Is it because I am finally seeing the true reflection of a pathetic creature? Is it perhaps simpler than any of these things? Or is it all these things—the conflu
ence of adult crises—commitment and infidelity and sickness and loss? Is it the realization that there is no going back?

 

In the lobby of the hospital, I buy two coffees.

A nurse leads me down a dim corridor on the cardiac floor. “He's in there,” she says, pointing to a door that's slightly ajar.

I hesitate and knock. For a moment, all I hear is the buzzing from some machine and a toilet flushing in the distance.

“Come in,” he says in a strong voice, those two words I've heard so many times when I've knocked on his office door.

But this time when I walk in, he's not behind his vast desk, clicking his fancy pen. This morning, he's a different man. No pinstripes or designer tie. The color's gone from his face; he's horizontal and hooked up to a number of tubes.

His cigar bar wisdom finds me now. And the pat and predictable words, bequeathed from one generation to another, echo in my head.
Don't do what I did. Don't let this job suck the life from you.

“It's a good look, huh?” he says, managing a laugh.

“Not bad.”

“A few cocktails and one bloody cigar and see what happens?” he whispers, smiling. “The gods are punishing me.”

“The price you must pay for being King Porterhouse,” I say. And together we laugh—mine high and nervous, his deep. But the harmony ends and we're left with a vulnerable expanse of quiet. I stand next to his bed, put my hand on his arm. “You okay?”

“Sure thing, kid,” he says matter-of-factly, a bit too quickly, with the detectable defiance of a seasoned attorney who's not quite telling the truth. Or who doesn't quite know it.

What he should say, it seems, what we so rarely have the courage to say: “I don't know.”

“What's wrong?” I ask.

And now Fisher really laughs, shaking in his bed, making those tubes dance. And I'm relieved to see some color again in his cheeks.

“What's wrong? Where do I begin? Today, nothing but a little old-fashioned heart attack,” he says. “They've been mumbling about bypass.”

He says these words without much affect, as if he's delivering the facts of a case.

“Are we double fisting again?” he says, nodding toward the twin cups of coffee I'm still grasping.

I hand him a coffee, which is likely an imprudent beverage for a cardiac patient. “Half and half, two sugars.”

He smiles and nods.

“A good lawyer pays attention to details,” I say.

“Channeling the lady lawyers of latter day,” he says. “Good girl.”

I think he catches me staring at the tubes that snake across him, and the small black and green screen, the ever-changing peaks and valleys of a threatened vitality.

Don't let this job suck the life from you.

“
You
can get out of this god-awful state. You aren't trapped here like I am,” he says, tugging on his IV.

“I think I'll stay awhile,” I say, smiling, settling into the fake leather armchair in the corner, the one patently meant for husbands and wives. I scroll through my BlackBerry, and offer a clumsy joke: “Any chance we can bill this time to the client?”

A nurse pops her head in, tells me to turn off my phone. “It might interfere with our equipment,” she says.

“Isn't it fascinating that we are more worried about machines interfering with other machines than machines interfering with us?” Fisher says, a timely philosopher with a profound point. And if I closed my eyes, it could be Dad talking.

“
This
machine's okay apparently,” Fisher says, turning on the TV that hangs precariously from the ceiling. We both sip coffee and settle on a channel that's airing reruns of
Law & Order
. But exhaustion overwhelms. He is tired because he's been up all night fighting for his life. I'm exhausted because I've been up all night fighting for mine.

I wake up when the door swings open. A small woman with frizzy dark hair flings herself at Fisher. The wife.

“Billy,” she says through fresh tears.

And with this, I can suddenly picture him as a boy. Billy Fisher. Not the cutest boy in class, but funny, and irreverent. And lovable.

“Mary,” he replies, and hugs her. He buries his face in her chest and I can't see his eyes, but I think he's crying too.

“I'm going to be just fine,” he promises her.

“What happened?” she asks, pulling away from him, wiping her eyes. And I wonder what these words really mean; if it's the first time she's dared ask such a dangerous, honest question in decades. And in his eyes, I see distance disappear.

“It seems your old Billy goat has a big bad broken heart,” he says, his voice both strong and cracking.

His wife giggles, awkwardly for a woman her age, and perches on the edge of his bed.

And I'm caught in the corner of this small room, an untimely impostor, witnessing a moment I shouldn't. A moment of—dare I say it—love. Not perfect, but palpable. No sparkling wheat field. But no dying tree either.

I stand. And his wife turns and sees me, half her age, sporting bedhead, smudged mascara and all.

“My name is Quinn,” I say, offering my hand. “I work with your husband.”

She shakes my hand limply and searches my eyes for an answer I can't give her. “I'm sure you do,” she says.

And it occurs to me that I am just another one. We're all the same really. Sure, at one time we had our natural hair color and quirks and hobbies. But now we all have good manners and good highlights. We wear gray and navy and black, drink too much coffee and booze.

Interchangeable, really.

Then she takes the coffee cup from his bedside. “Are you allowed to have this?” she asks sharply, a simple question sprung from not-so-simple depths, fear and anxiety and anger dancing in her breath.

And Fisher becomes Billy, a little boy who's in trouble but doesn't know why exactly. He shrugs, catching my eye only briefly as I sneak out.

I book a flight for early the next morning. I go back to my hotel. To my room. For hours, I lie on that bed, that beige bed I should have slept in. For hours, I lie there alone and cry.

 

At the airport, the security line is long and moves slowly. Tired souls scrutinize photo IDs and tell us to remove our shoes. We fill plastic bins with machines—phones and computers and video games. We don't speak. But we eye each other, sizing each other up, trying to smell evil among aromas of stinky feet and fast food.

“They should rename this the insecurity line,” a wise stranger mumbles.

At the newsstand, I stock up on tabloids and gummy can
dy. For once, I linger. I take time to look at all the silly items I usually breeze by, the cheap souvenirs that guilty husbands bring home for waiting wives and kiddies. Out-of-season snow globes, pens that light up, aprons with the shape of Texas emblazoned up front. I see a mug and grab it.

“The Best Way to a Fisherman's Heart Is Through His Fly.”

I stop at a little sports bar and find a stool. Under the baseball game, a ticker reminds us that the alert level is orange. A bartender sidles up, and without thinking of it, I order a Bloody Mary. “Extra spicy,” I say, and think of Fisher and his Mary, that small hospital room that looks like all the others. And it occurs to me that hospital rooms are just like hotel rooms are just like us lawyers. We serve a purpose, yes. But we're fungible. Each one of us is expensive, a generic copy of the next, sadly waiting to be filled.

I pull out my BlackBerry. For once, it doesn't blink.

I take a large sip of my drink and type in “bypass.”

To avoid (an obstacle) by using an alternative channel, passage, or route.

I board the plane and walk to the back, past the forest of sad and aging men. I take off my jacket, roll it into a ball, and shove it overhead. No one says anything. The man next to me pulls out a weathered copy of
Moby Dick
, and flips to the middle.

The flight attendant reminds us to shut off our cell phones. And, happily, I comply. As if wireless signals are truly our biggest foe.

And as I dive into the rainbow pages of a gossip magazine and chew a fluorescent worm, bypassing brewing blockages and emotional malpractice, still gripping that porcelain mea culpa, a little baby cries.