Lithium for Medea

7

I walked back into the hospital. I found Francine in the cafeteria. She was sitting alone, staring at a round wall clock. Her amber eyes, eyes like slabs of yellow agate, were blood red from crying.

“I thought you’d run away. That’s what you’re good at, kid. And always when I need you the most. Oh, what’s the use? You’re strictly six,” Francine said.

She meant I could run only six furlongs. Stakes races are longer. A mile and an eighth. A mile and a quarter. It wasn’t enough to sprint. A great horse had to go the longer distances.

We sat in silence. Later we paced the corridor in front of the operating room. Much later the doctor came out. His hands trembled.

“It was touch and go.” The doctor pushed past us toward the elevator. “Touch and go. But I think we got it all.” He meant the cancer.

“What about now?” Francine followed the surgeon. He walked faster but she caught up with him. She grabbed his arm. She brought her face very close to his. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“He’s resting. I suggest you do the same.” The elevator doors swung shut.

Francine and I looked at one another. Then we walked out to the parking lot. The air was very cold.

“I know he’s going to die tonight. Trust my intuition. He’s dying right now. I can feel his life force leaking out. Oh, God, help me.”

I held Francine for a moment. She looked startled, almost embarrassed. Then she turned her face away. As I drove home, I kept thinking of her face, pale and frightened, skin white as a sheet draped over a dead man.

I waited for the hospital to call, formal and polite, crisp white words saying the man you call father is dead. Clear white words polished and hard, glistening, horrible, a kind of marble. He hemorrhaged. There was a sudden uncontrollable infection. White words like white stones, gravestones.

I waited. Nothing. Silence.

It was night, definitely night. The shadow battle had ended. The sun climbed back into Santa Monica Bay. The sun was a useless thing lying on the cool sandy ocean floor, eyeless and poisoning fish.

I turned on lights, trying to obliterate the night. I walked through the rooms of my house, the Woman’s House, where I have lived six years watching the special seasons of the canals, the silver and grease-yellow, the abundant and quick-tongued shadows, the gray fog and sullen thickening brown edging into ink. For six years I have witnessed the water in front of my house, now churning, now changing, completing some cycle meaningful only to itself.

Suddenly the rooms of my house looked different, as if they were soft, as if they lacked edges and spines. As I paced the rooms of my house, I felt a chill. The chill was within. Something was stirring, beating strong wings and creating a current, a soft cooling wind. It seemed to grow, continually more urgent, insistent, something opening within, like a flower. And I thought, I am twenty-seven years old and a pine tree my age knows more. And I thought maybe this enormous opening flower should be named Rose.

I walked through my house, through the odd familiar rooms, opening closets and drawers, picking up objects at random like an amnesiac. I found myself holding an album of photographs. I found myself staring at Gerald.

Gerald had been a wound, cauterized and sealed shut, all in a limited way. Now it was somehow breaking loose, leaking out like blood. (Like my father’s blood?) The passage of time had done nothing to alleviate the pain. Time merely softened certain essential edges. Things blurred. There was a loss of resonance, a slow irretrievable spillage.

I turned the album pages slowly. Each frame was clear, so clear it must have been autumn in Berkeley, the sharp Northern California fall when the wind blows hard, sweeping away the residues, the layers and veils that seem to separate faces and fence slats from another, more fragile reality.

I am standing in front of a polar bear cage in the San Francisco zoo. Wind blows. The picture was taken during a time when Gerald had to go to the zoo each day for a class on primate social behavior. He took notes on various animal interactions. He had a special notebook in which he assigned the gorillas and orangutans names like Alpha Male or Juvenile and marked down each time they had dominance interactions or engaged in aggressive displays.

“Don’t stare at me,” Gerald had screamed, suddenly whirling around and facing me.

He had been going to the zoo every day for weeks. He refused to allow me to accompany him. Finally, on a day so clear, so perfectly etched, that even Gerald sensed a promise in the pale sunlight, he relented. “Just don’t say a single word, not one,” he cautioned.

I had left him in front of the gorilla enclosure and wandered through the zoo by myself. In the photograph I look directly at the camera. I look happy. I hadn’t rushed into the North Beach night yet. Who took the photograph?

It is our apartment in Berkeley. Books, chess pieces and record albums lie in heaps on the floor around me. A chair has been pushed over. A lamp lies on the floor. The shade is three feet away.

“I want to document this,” I told Gerald at the end of the argument. “I want to remember this.” And he had taken the photograph.

I had been trying to convince Gerald to go to the student hospital. He said he’d rather see a shaman. We were discussing his impotence. Gerald said he was working on it. In fact, it was one of the fundamental aspects of his studies. Presumably from physics and mathematical psychology, from cave wall drawings and diagrams on how to set rabbit traps in the tundra, Gerald was going to find an answer to why his penis just curled in his lap like a fat sleepy worm.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” I screamed, terrified, sick.

“You have no concept of patience, of the right time and place, the natural cosmic rhythms. All you do is nag.”

“Is that so?” I screamed. I walked over to the bookcase. With both hands, I emptied an entire shelf onto the floor. The books bounced and ricocheted off each other. They lay at pointed angles like a stack of plucked feathers.

It is our marriage picture. At the Las Vegas Palace of Marriage a photograph was included in the price. We stand near one another, posed in front of a fireplace where synthetic logs burn. We stand close but do not touch. We are not smiling. I am wearing orchids. I remember Gerald bought me two. It was very hot and they died almost immediately. It was odd having two orchids. I wore them pinned to my dress. They looked like grotesque twin breasts.

The longer I studied the photographs, the more interested I became in the periphery. Gerald Campbell no longer mattered. Always his shoulders slump into shadow. His face drifts off to the palest corner of the remembered room. It is not necessary to edit him. His presence is tentative and easily ignored. Gerald erases himself.

I find myself drawn to the objects. Whose fireplace did we stand in front of? Who snapped us, arms almost touching, in front of what mantel? What round wooden table is it? Whose green china teapot? Where is that black iron railing? On what terrace, in what city?

It is important to be precise. One must carefully assemble the details. I pour tea from a green china teapot. I draw the curtains apart and admit sunlight into my house. I bend down in noon sunlight to water a patch of new blood-red canna pushing up near my front-yard fence. The self has already been defined.

Suddenly I felt a terrible stinging uselessness. I assembled the few gifts Gerald had given me. There was a string of too big, too bright imitation coral beads I could never bring myself to wear, not even once. They looked like the sort of thing one sees wrapped around a mannequin’s neck in airport gift shops, next to plastic leis and ashtrays saying Hawaii in gaudy goldish letters.

I found the blouse Gerald had bought me, one birthday or Christmas. It was a big billowing affair in yellow and magenta and red stripes. It was much too large for me, as if in Gerald’s eyes I was enormous. I held the blouse against me. I looked like a soiled cloud.

There were more bits and pieces of Gerald. Pots and pans we had bought when we first moved to Berkeley. They were old, stained by a dozen different sinks. I had scrubbed them a thousand times and they still stank of him.

The telephone rang. My hands were shaking. This is it, I thought. My father is dead.

“I’m cleaning it up,” Jason breathed at me. He meant he was cleaning the globs of pink and peach and yellow from his square glass palette. He meant the model had gone home.

“You coming over?” His voice was water falling through dark green ferns. His voice was a slow wind brushing the crepe petals of poppies. “Give me half an hour?”

Half an hour? What did he have to do? Erase the traces of the evening he had, the two wineglasses, the rumpled sheets, the hard evidence of his life which he knows, after all this time, locks me in a terrible silence.

Jason is careful. He folds their blouses and jackets neatly in his bedroom closet. Still, I see the gifts they bring him, the handmade ceramic vases with pressed flowers pushed through narrow channels in the clay, the batik wall hangings with sea shells and stones glassy from waves and age tangled in the threads.

It is odd, but I have always felt myself superior to these women with their portable pasts, their interchangeable presents, their lives of endless transition. Of course, it is just a feeling, something locked within me for which I have no hard evidence.

I held the receiver very tight in my hand. All I said was yes.

I remembered the pile of clothing and knickknacks, household goods and photographs on my living room floor. I scooped them up into bags and threw the bags into the trash cans in the alley behind my house.

After what seemed a suitable passage of time, I wound my way across bridges and eroded pavement to Jason’s house. In places, the sidewalk dipped down to mud or narrowed to a dirt trail. I pushed palm fronds back with my hands. I crossed an alley littered with parts of bicycles, pieces of stained rugs and piles of rusty nails glistening like red worms in the moonlight. The sky and water were an identical shade of deep purple, perfect mirrors. A thin haze was low in the sky and drifted across the cool water, a soft gauze.

I opened Jason’s gate. I walked carefully past the rows of planted vegetables in his front yard, the artichokes, tomatoes, broccoli and strawberries all nodding their slow green heads.

Jason’s door was opened. I walked in. I knew precisely where to go.