Extraordinary

Two

She looked up from the candle flame. “Are we going to do this thing?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll stay?”

“Of course I’ll stay.”

And I thought, Nothing works out the way you think it will. And this won’t either. So I know which way it won’t work out. But the other way, the way it will, that I don’t know. How was it supposed to go again? The climb up eighteen flights of stairs, the quick walk down the hall, into the apartment. But then what? I can’t seem to recall. What did I think would come after the apartment? The next day, the next week. A year later. Five years later. Surely I must have thought about that: that the end of something isn’t necessarily the end of it. A man parts the curtains one morning and discovers an entire planet revolving just outside the window. Oh, I see.

Sally looked back at the flame, nodding. “What were we talking about?”

“Edward Albee.”

“Somebody asked Freddie about him one night when he was holding court in the Cucaracha bar. ‘If homosexuality had not existed, Albee would have invented it,’ Freddie said.” Sally smiled affectionately. “You could tell he’d said it before. Please, another Drambuie.”

In the kitchen doorway, I turned around. “I have to turn the light on now. Close your eyes.”

Settled with a brandy snifter that burned like dark gold in her hand, she continued. “Freddie Steigman dressed like a slightly down-at-the-heels salesman from the fifties. Heavy New York accent. A face part bulldog, part baseball mitt. Loved to drink. He wore a baby blue linen jacket every day of the year. He had two or three of them, identically wrinkled, and a white Mexican shirt that he kept unbuttoned almost to the waist. He reminded me of the retired history teacher in The Catcher in the Rye. Except it was endearing, it was tender, it was adorable, this old blade with a bony chest insisting he was still in the game.

“And he was. Once a month, Freddie took the bus to Mexico City, hired the prettiest boy he could find in the red light district. He paid well, never got beaten up and came back the following Monday with a light step and interested in everything. I adored him.

“Freddie knew everybody in San Miguel, and he liked knowing everyone. He got me a ground floor sublet, with an old piano somebody had left behind, a patio and a view of the mountains. When someone asked me where I lived, I’d say, ‘Callejón de los Muertos.’ The Street of Dead Lanterns. I loved how it rolled off my tongue. Three weeks after my arrival, Freddie threw a party for me.

“The events that day haven’t lost a drop of colour. They’re vivid the way the world looks when you suddenly surface after swimming underwater. I must have been paying a certain kind of attention. Why, I don’t know. Unless you believe that stuff. I’ve been over these details a million times. Because if I had done anything differently, if I had taken this street instead of that street, if I’d lingered over the lines in the fruit stall a few moments longer, then what happened would not have happened. It’s like watching Romeo and Juliet: even though you know the story backwards, you keep hoping that this time the Friar will get the letter to Romeo.

“I took a morning sketch class at the Institute. We were drawing a bare-breasted Mexican girl with a beauty spot on her right shoulder. She had a gap between her front teeth and you could see by the way she smiled that she was shy about it. After the class, some of the students, mostly women, stayed on to talk to the instructor, a Frenchman who smoked Gauloises through an absurdly long cigarette filter. But I had things to do. I bought fruit for the party in the mercado and then I met Jan Trober for a coffee at the Cucaracha. She was a New York actress who had settled in San Miguel after the bottom fell out of her career and her husband left her. We sat at a table on the sidewalk so we could see all the people in the town square. The boys walking in a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”

The candle sputtered and went out. We sat in the silence and the darkness. After a while, I said, “Shall I light another candle?”

“No, let’s just sit here like this for a while.”

In the hallway, voices speaking an Indian dialect passed by the door. It’s going to be dark in here tomorrow night, I thought. And for a few nights afterwards; and everything will be different. You assume things are going to be a certain way afterwards, and then you find out, like Macbeth did, that they’re not. Preposterously not. The act, or its after-burn rather, becomes who you are.

How could I have been so naive?

“In Mexico, up in the mountains where I lived, I sometimes felt as if I had just emigrated from a country where it always rained,” Sally said. And it seemed as though I had overheard her thinking, that she hadn’t actually meant to say anything.

A door shut with a bang and the Indian voices disappeared.

And Sally, where will she be? I mean physically. And that too seemed like an extraordinary thing not to have considered. Because you don’t just go into the air when you die; you go other places first, and they’re not so pleasant.

In the darkness, she continued. “Freddie lived on a narrow, windy cobblestone street a few blocks up from the cathedral. He found it comforting, he said, all that redemption so close at hand. He invited all his friends to the party. By sunset, his patio looked like Fire Island. Those tans, those biceps, those white teeth. There were other people too. A Brit with a pirate’s moustache, a sixties rock star from some California band, a handful of alcoholic writers who had spent the morning in the Cucaracha talking about their unfinished Ph.D.s. There was a mysterious, tall Canadian who wouldn’t let anyone take his picture. Some people said he was CIA. I think he’d just been thwarted by life in Toronto and was trying to make himself seem interesting. There was a retired Australian ambassador—some sort of scandal there, I forget what.

“Oh yes, and divorcees! God, so many divorcees. Women with short haircuts and children in Ivy League schools. For them, San Miguel was the last stop before the Pacific Ocean. Their last chance for a slow dance. Even if it meant sleeping with the gardener at night and letting him watch television by the pool all day long. These were transactions, yes, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t friendly, even loving. And let’s face it, a friendly body in the bed is a friendly body in the bed; after a certain age, who cares why it’s there.

“I was cutting limes in the kitchen with Freddie when I recognized a voice in the other room. It was a friend from Toronto who was passing through San Miguel, had stopped for a drink at the Cucaracha and somebody told her about Freddie’s party.

“I heard her say, ‘I hope you don’t mind me crashing in like this.’ I came out of the kitchen, and I was just moving through the living room when I tripped on the carpet, hit my head on the fireplace and broke my neck.

“I didn’t know it was broken at the time. But I knew something bad had happened because I heard a sound I had never heard before. I’ve talked to other people who broke their necks and they say the same thing: in that sound, you know your life is never going to be the same again.

“I lay there for I don’t know how long. There were heads appearing and disappearing above me, but the whole time my body was capable of only one sensation, and that sensation was not pain, it was dread, a sensation that said, like a blunt instrument banging under the floor, This is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing.

“I heard the voices in the room go silent, like lifting a needle off a record, and that frightened me. And it seemed that I heard Bruce breathing through his nose and saying to someone, She brought this on herself.

“And then I heard other voices, the kind you hear on television. ‘Don’t move her, don’t move her.’ It occurred to me, even there on the floor, that it sounded like television because it was from television. Like ‘Boil some water.’ People are always telling people to boil water on television.”

She breathed deeply and after a pause said, “We should light another candle now. There’s a box of them near the Drambuie. Over the fridge. They’re made from beeswax.”

I pulled down a red candle, unwrapped it from the delicate tissue paper it was covered with and put it on the table between us.

“There’s no paraffin in beeswax candles,” Sally said. “They’re better for the health. More ions. Or fewer. Whichever.”

I lit the candle with a long kitchen match. We watched the wick gradually change shape as the flame caught and gathered brightness. I was suddenly exhausted.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she said.

“What?”

“How people could be so cruel that they could burn another human being alive.”

“Good heavens.”

“You know who I’m thinking of. Whom, rather.”

“Yes.”

“Poor little thing. What was she—fourteen?”

“Something like that.”

“Will you stay the night here? All this booze, I’m going to have to take a pee.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t leave before me.” She smiled at her own joke.

I opened my lips to respond but didn’t.

“When people ask me about the accident—?” she said, her voice rising into a question at the end of the phrase.

“Yes.”

“How I broke my neck at a cocktail party?”

“Yes.”

“They never say it, but I know that they assume I was drunk.”

“Really?”

“I think they rather hope I was.”

“Why would they hope that?”

“Because it’s less tragic,” she said.

“How would it be less tragic?”

“If I was drunk, they could think, Well, she was partly responsible.”

“But if you were sober…”

“If I was sober, then it makes the whole thing, and the consequences that flowed out of it, arbitrary.”

“The consequences?”

“Paralysis. A ruined life. That’s how they see it, not me.”

“Did you ever?” I said.

“See it as a ruined life? Oh heavens, yes. But that changed. But even after all these years, when I first meet people—?”

“Yes?”

“I feel compelled to explain that I wasn’t drunk. That I was just about to have my first margarita. That’s what I was doing in the kitchen with Freddie—making margaritas.”

“Why do you feel compelled to tell them that?”

“Because I don’t want them to think poorly of me.”

“I doubt if they’d do that.” My eyes settled on the cloth figure of the mischievous whale. Red seagulls soared overhead. What was he winking about? What is the secret that he and I supposedly share? “Everybody’s gotten drunk at one point or another,” I said.

I could feel a story insinuating itself onto my tongue, how, years before, I had gone to the washroom on the dark second-floor hallway of a Queen Street bar. Someone had forgotten to rope off the back stairs, and on my way to the washroom, a little unsteady on my feet, I turned right instead of left and tumbled face first down the stairs to the bottom landing. I scrambled to my feet, as if by getting up quickly I might prevent some physical damage, the possibility of which had already passed.

I was uninjured, not even a bruise. But the event has stayed with me over the years, and I still revisit it at peculiar times: during a bout of insomnia or an afternoon daydream while the snow is falling. I suspect it was my being so drunk that saved me—I should have broken my neck, but I bounced like rubber. Bump, bump, bump, thud! It occurs to me, in those four a.m. bouts where your thoughts seem always to land on the wrong foot no matter where they start, that I am as haunted these days by the catastrophes that didn’t happen or almost happened as I am by the ones that did. Is it, I wonder, that dark hour alone which sends you so far afield in pursuit of such things, such ugly little flowers? Why does one never think of these things in the daylight?

I kept the story to myself for the simple reason that I was in the company of a woman who had been the victim of a less colourful incident (carpet, fireplace) but the manifestations of which had disfigured her life in a matter of seconds. What does such an event say? Is the lure of religion some kind of protection from such a thing happening? From the despair that it could happen? Does happen? Why would I walk away from my accident and she didn’t walk away from hers? So there can’t be an afterlife, I thought. Because that would mean there has to be a God. And what kind of God would allow such a thing to happen? In what way is such an incident instructive?

“You’ve gone off somewhere,” Sally said. “Where did you go?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Yes, you are.”

I grabbed the handle, so to speak, of the first pot I could reach, the recent death of a casual acquaintance, Bobby Coatsworth. Brain cancer. He was a television news anchorman with such a deep broadcaster’s voice that sometimes you couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t putting you on. The cancer started in his throat and bounced around his body like a pinball. Killed him in ten months. When I heard the news, I said, Well, Bobby was always a pretty tense guy. As if his being tense was why he got cancer. And why I didn’t.

As I talked, Sally leaned forward in her chair, testing her elbow on an embroidered pillow. She was looking at me closely, waiting for something. I went on, “You hear about a plane crash, you want to know immediately where the plane was coming from, or where it was going to.”

“Really?”

“Because—because then you think, I never go there anyway.”

“Did you think that when the Air France plane went down last summer?”

“I did. I thought, Well shit, they were going to São Paulo. As if going to São Paulo had anything to do with the cargo door falling off over the Atlantic.”

“Did you feel that way about my accident? That I had it coming?”

“Never. Not for a second.”

“I wonder why not.”

“Because I love you.”

It didn’t make any sense, it didn’t follow anything, but I’ve always been glad I said it, always been glad it just blurted out.

The telephone rang. The purring kind. Purr. Pause. Purr, purr.

“Let it go,” she said. “I’m having too much fun.”

Like waiting for a waiter to finish pouring the wine and leave the table, we waited for the phone to stop.

“Did you have anything in your hands?”I said.

“What?”

“When you tripped on the carpet in Mexico, did you have anything in your hands?”

“That’s a question no one’s ever asked me.”

“Perhaps it’s not so interesting a question.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I have often wondered why you didn’t throw your hands up to protect your face. Or was it all too fast?”

“No, it wasn’t too fast,” she said in the tones of one who is deciding whether or not to pursue a subject. “You know why I didn’t throw my hands up? I didn’t throw my hands up because I was born with an eccentric deficiency. Move a little closer to me.”

I hesitated. “Is this going to be something that hurts?”

“I don’t do things like that. I hate people who do things like that. But come a little closer.”

I got up and stood above her.

“Bend down a bit.”

“Sally.”

“Trust me.”

I bent over. She took one of my hands and moved it toward her face. She did it the first time slowly, the second time a little faster. “When I was born, I was born without a reflex to protect my face. I wore glasses in high school and when I was playing sports. I didn’t need them, but if something lurched at my face, I didn’t react.”

Then she took my hand—her hand was very warm, the fingers curled inward but her fingernails were beautifully maintained—and moved it slowly toward my face. I think it was more of a reason to touch me, to have me touch her, than to illustrate what she meant. But I was glad to do it. Glad to touch her. I thought to myself, Am I the last person who will ever touch you? Is mine the final human contact? I let her hand rest on my face.

She said, “Whereas if I make a motion toward your face, you’ll put up your hands, you’ll blink.”

I pulled my eyes away from her. I could feel my chest tighten. I said, “You never told me that before.” I sat back down.

“Where was I?” she asked.

“You were lying on the dining room floor of Freddie’s house.”

“A local doctor arrived. He gave me a shot. I woke up in a helicopter. It took me from San Miguel to the ABC hospital in Mexico City.”

“Didn’t you have to pee by then?”

“Everything had shut down. From my neck downwards. It was like waking up in somebody else’s sleeping body. You want to move your arm, but your arm won’t obey, as if it has forgotten the language the two of you spoke and all it hears now is gibberish.

“Three or four doctors came in. They spoke only in English, even when they were talking to each other. A very classy gesture—they didn’t want me wondering what was being said. Still, I did have the feeling that I had become somehow the object of a Martian science experiment. A doctor brushed the sole of my foot with what looked like a Popsicle stick. ‘Does that tickle?’ he said. And I kept saying, ‘Have you done it yet, have you done it yet?’ And then they switched to my other foot, same business, and there was something about the matter-of-factness, the professional matter-of-factness with which they responded to my question Have you done it yet? that filled me with a kind of dull fright, as if the fright itself was a piece of lead in my body.

“I asked them a question. The question. But they wouldn’t answer it. They put me in a long metal tube with lights inside and a round window. Like a small spaceship. Sometimes I was looking at the ceiling tiles, other times I was looking at the floor tiles. Like a human sausage on a rotisserie.

“The next day or the day after, a doctor came in to see me. He was a lanky man with thick grey hair, like a movie star playing a Mexican doctor. Dr. Philippe Ortoya. He flirted with me. Maybe it was therapy. While he was checking my pupils, I said, ‘I want you to tell me the truth, Doctor. Will I ever run down the street again?’

“‘No,’ he said.

“‘Will I ever climb the stairs to my bedroom on the second floor?’

“‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.

“‘Will I ever be able to go to the bathroom without a bag on my leg?’

“He said, ‘It’s too early to tell.’

“I said, ‘Is that the best news you have for me?’

“Dr. Ortoya seemed to understand what I was thinking, because he said to me, ‘We get used to situations.’

“‘Not this situation.’

“He said, ‘Do nothing rash. Wait.’

“I said to him, ‘Is there anything to wait for?’

“‘Are you religious?’

“When I heard that, I thought, Boy oh boy, am I ever going to kill myself! Suddenly, there was a real urgency to do it—to do it quickly, before anybody could read my mind and stop me. But that’s the problem with being crippled: You can’t kill yourself. The best you can do is fall out of your bed and bang your head on the floor. But that’s not going to kill you.

“And you can’t ask a friend to roll you to the edge of a cliff and look away for a second. Because even then, you can’t get out of your fucking chair. You have to have someone tip you. And, you know, finding someone to tip you over the side of a cliff, that’s a tall order. Those kinds of friends are hard to come by.

“One night, as I lay in my hospital bed in Mexico City, I watched a romance start up in the building across the street between a man with a mop and a bucket—he must have been new on the job—and a woman in a blue apron who was going from office to office emptying the wastepaper baskets. It was the middle of the night, just their floor was illuminated, and you could see them working their way toward each other. The one thing that nothing, not even gravity, can stop: people finding their way to each other even in a dark building. It went for a week like this, the two of them meeting in the brightly lit office and talking. And then one night I saw the man get up and go over and turn off the lights. Just for a half-hour or so. And I wondered if, in my condition, I would ever be part of that world again. Would I––” Here she paused, as if the instant in which the original thought had first occurred to her reopened like a seed in her memory. “Would I ever be attractive to the opposite sex again?

“Sometimes, when I opened my eyes, I expected to discover myself back in Toronto. As if Mexico and Freddie Steigman and my patio looking at the mountains and the party and the limes on the cutting board and the knock at the door and the carpet and the voices going silent were the kind of unhealthy fog you drift around in when you have slept too long. A progression into staleness.

“But then I’d glance around my room, I’d hear Spanish voices in the hallway, and I’d think, This can’t possibly have happened to me. You go to a party, you cross the room, you trip on the carpet. Do you know how many coincidences have to happen for you to arrive there? But there is no reward in figuring out the statistics, is there? Because it all returns you to here and now.

“I woke up once after midnight. My legs were on fire. Some terrible, insistent pain, like an animal staring at me from the doorway. I lay there listening to the soft swish of white shoes outside my room, back and forth, back and forth. I thought, I’m going to lie here very still and this thing will go away; it’ll get bored and go away. But it didn’t. It just sort of flopped itself across the doorway with a grunt and waited. Pain, I’m telling you—pain and the things that come with pain—it’s such a horribly private business. I’m sure for some people that the actual act of dying is a relief. If only to extinguish those monotonous, incommunicable, repetitive cartoons.

“I pushed a button on a cord and an angel appeared at the side of my bed. She gave me a fat pink pill. It left a bitter taste at the back of my throat, even with a glass of water, but I suspected that good things would come with that taste. And they did. I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake, but I could actually watch my thoughts take on a physical shape, even colour, like people in a novel who suddenly forget they’re characters and start moving around on their own. Pursuing their own concerns.

“I buzzed the nurse. I asked her to raise up my bed as high as it would go, to prop me up on pillows so that the whole of Mexico City lay below me. It must have been a Saturday night. The town was lit up like a pulsing Christmas tree, and I felt like something very good was just about to happen to me. Somebody was playing the piano. How perfect, and yet how odd—a piano on a hospital ward in the middle of the night.

“I thought about Dr. Ortoya in his crisp linen jacket, about the angel in the whispering shoes, about all the life in Mexico City. In the bars, in the streets, in the cantinas, in the houses—all this glittering, energized life. I thought of Chloe, smiling in her sleep. And I thought, This is a good deal, being alive. Life is a good deal.

“But the next day, things didn’t seem so cheerful. And even in that clear sunlight, the banality of the world seemed like the dominant chord.” Here, Sally paused for a moment. “Or perhaps because of the sunlight,” she added privately. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it was my third day in the hospital. A grey day outside my window. The city flat, lifeless. All night long, a man across the hall with a bullet wound in his thigh had been groaning. I didn’t hear him come in. I was dreaming about lying on a dock at the edge of a country lake. You were there. So was your older brother, Jake. We were all tanned. Tanned and skinny. I could hear the wind passing through the pine trees on the shore. You know that sound it makes, that swish, the pine needles rubbing their hands together.

“I was lying face down; I could smell the sun-bleached wood; I could hear the water lapping under the dock. Little by little, the groaning of the man in the hospital bed across the hall began to mingle with the sounds I could hear on the dock: a boat crossing the bay, the water lapping under the boards, the wind in the pine trees, a man groaning with a bullet in his thigh.

“I woke up. Rain splattered on the hospital windows—fat, dull-witted drops. Splat, splat, splat, not like regular rain, but like transparent jelly thrown at the glass. Splat, splat, splat. The pill had worn off, leaving behind a sort of flatness like a winter field that stretches all the way to the horizon. And I thought that this is what life is like without my pill, this field that you walk across forever. Yes, I’m going to use all my intelligence, all my creativity, to put an end to this. I was, at that very second, wondering how to get more pills out of my angel when a girl as thin as a pencil appeared in the doorway. It was my daughter, Chloe.

“‘How are you feeling, Mama?’ she said, and the sound of her voice, with its tiny, uncertain wobble, broke my heart. It just cut me in half, and within seconds I realized that all my plans, my schemes, my scenarios for killing myself, were suddenly in the back seat, suddenly in the past tense. Inconceivable. Like a drunken fantasy from whose grips you awake thinking, What in Heaven’s name was all that about?

“If grown-ups can get used to new and dreadful circumstances fast, children do it with a speed that’s breathtaking. They really are built for survival. It was like watching an eyeball come into focus, the way Chloe accepted the new version of me—the neck brace, crabbed hands, the motionless legs.

“There she was, perched like a bird on the side of my bed, talking about a red-haired girl at the American school she attended in San Miguel, about why so many boys liked her. What is it about some girls that boys like? she wondered. And I could see that she was completely absorbed by the red-haired girl. The sun came back out and transformed the city into a dazzling foreign port.”