Life #6. Diana Wagman

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СКАЧАТЬ against the cool wall and closed my eyes. Someone tapped on my shoulder and I jumped. It was another educator, a friend, Eileen.

      “You okay?”

      “Just tired.”

      “No kidding,” she said. “It’s the weather. See you Friday.”

      “Yup. Thanks. Bye.”

      In my car, I took out my cell phone and listened again to the message from my doctor, the woman who had delivered my son twenty years earlier. “Hi. It’s Carolyn. I’m so sorry. The biopsy came back positive I’m afraid.”

      She was sorry? She was afraid? What did she know about fear or sorrow? Her husband was also a doctor. Their two girls attended the city’s most expensive private school. They lived out here in Malibu, close to this incredible museum. Oh yes, she said when I told her I gave tours, I can see the Getty from my deck. I’m afraid. I’m sorry. Well, me too. I hadn’t called Harry, my husband. I knew he was home in his usual spot on the couch in front of CNN. Two years earlier he’d lost his job after seventeen years as a reporter for the LA Times. He was angry and agitated. He’d taken it very, very personally despite his hundred or more colleagues who had been fired with him. All over the country older, respected, highly paid journalists were out of work. Harry had almost given up looking for a new job. There wasn’t much out there and his frustration made him a difficult candidate in an interview. We were broke. My three days a week didn’t make a dent in the monthly bills, our refinanced mortgage, our son’s college tuition. I felt sick when I thought of how much cancer might cost. Blue Cross could, might, probably would find some reason to cancel our already exorbitantly expensive insurance. Harry would say it didn’t matter, I knew he would be willing to sell the house, the cars, whatever it took. But then where would we be? If I died—if I died after all the treatment anyway—there was no point to leaving my family destitute.

      I blinked. I’d driven down the Getty’s driveway and turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway on automatic pilot. At this rate, a car accident would kill me before cancer. I still had my cell phone in one hand. I dropped it into my bag. Harry certainly didn’t need to hear the bad news over the phone. I would tell him, but at home, when I could look in his gray eyes. I’m sorry, I would say, it’s cancer I’m afraid.

      The heavens opened—my mother’s phrase—and it poured. I crept along, traffic bumper-to-bumper. There was plenty of time to look out at the ocean beside me. The water was choppy, the color of an old file cabinet except for the fleshy froth. Even through my closed windows I could smell the fish and brine. Why anyone found the beach appealing was a mystery to me. A couple jogged along the sand in the rain. Idiots. Harry’s favorite word. I smiled. Fucking idiots, his favorite two-word phrase. As crazy as he was these days, he could still make me smile.

      In sickness and in health. For richer and poorer. It’s too much to ask. Our wedding invitation is framed and hanging in the hallway by the laundry room. It reads, “Join us as we exchange our vows.” Perhaps that’s all Harry and I should have offered each other: to exchange our vows, our promises, our obligations however small. You do mine and I will do yours. Before the dearly beloved gathered together we should have sworn, “I will write all your thank you notes. I will have dinner with your boring cousin. I will sit through that monotonous meeting at work. Whatever awful thing you have sworn to do will now be my task.” Forget rich, poor, healthy, sick, honoring, cherishing and ‘til death do us part. Promise something reasonable.

      I turned inland and onto the eastbound freeway, relieved to leave the sea.

3.

      Fiona climbed up the ladder to the deck before the sun cleared the horizon. Her eyelids were heavy and her face swollen from crying and not sleeping. Overnight she had become Neanderthal.

      She and Nathan had spent the night before searching all over Newport for Luc. He had gone on an errand for Nathan—to buy a spool shackle, whatever that was—early in the morning and not come back. She and Nathan had driven the streets of Newport, back and forth, up and down. Nathan had been exhausting, parental, asking about Luc and his habit, how long, how she could stand it. She had answered as ambiguously as possible—he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand Luc’s life—until finally, finally she saw him through the window of an all-night donut shop. He was nodding off in the back booth, a cup of untouched coffee in front of him. He looked up when she said his name and took her hands. He was wobbly, unmoored, his muscles oddly disconnected from his skin, but he was glad to see her. That was all that mattered.

      Nathan was upset and Fiona kept urging him to be gentle as they helped Luc to the car. Nathan asked him questions, but Luc had no answers. “A guy.” “The park.” “No, no, no.”

      Back at the boat, she put him to bed, smelled that metallic tang on his skin she recognized from New York. She told him it was fine, it was all right, she was glad he’d had fun. She lied and lied.

      “Don’t be mad,” he whispered. “I can’t wait for you to try it. It’s wonderful, transcendent, ambrosia, the stuff of legends.”

      His words slipped and slurred together. She bit her lip but the tears came anyway. In the dark, Luc could not see—as high as he was, he would never notice. He scratched and scratched. She took his hand, put her leg over one of his. She would be his anchor.

      “You’re the only woman for me.” He struggled to sit up. “Io, you know what I realized?” His whispers grew louder. “I saw it, like a sign in the sky. I saw it. I love you. I love you so much. You’re not like anyone else. You’re the only one I’d ever ask to go across the ocean with me. The only one. Only you can sail my seven seas, be my pirate queen, my mermaid, the maiden of my maiden voyage.”

      Doug, in the bunk across the cabin, stirred.

      “Hush. Go to sleep,” she hissed.

      “I can’t.”

      “Try.”

      “Sing to me.”

      “Everybody’s sleeping. That’s Doug—the new crewmember—right there.”

      “Please?”

      She breathed a little tune he liked, a lullaby about the things she would give him. A mocking bird. A looking glass. A diamond ring. When she got to the billy goat, she stopped and punched him in the arm. “Billy. This is his fault.” It was beautiful Billy who had introduced Luc to heroin, skinny Billy who strangely was strong enough to take it or leave it, dancer Billy who now—in his dreamy, giggly way—told Luc to slow down. “Fucking Billy.” She never swore.

      “But you love me.”

      “I—” She didn’t want to be conventional. He hated conventional.

      “And I love you, Io, Io, Io.” He rolled over on his side away from her. He scratched his arm, his thigh, scratching and scratching until he fell asleep.

      She stayed awake beside him most of the night. At one point she turned to wipe her tears and saw Doug’s eyes open, watching her. She shook her head. Go to sleep, go to sleep. She had turned her back to him.

      A bleached winter sun was creeping over the horizon. It was colder than the day before. Fiona wrapped her arms across her chest as she stepped up the final rung onto the deck. The boat rocked and she fell against the open hatch, banging her hip hard. She gritted her teeth so she wouldn’t cry, again. Why couldn’t this boat СКАЧАТЬ