Nobody's Angel

43

LOITERING BEFORE THE HOSPITAL SEEMED NOT THE IDEAL thing. Pacing like an expectant father, he had less than the routine beatitude upon his face. Presently Claire emerged, and from an unofficial doorway, suggesting familiarity with the place.

“He’s resting. He’s completely conscious.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that he was surprised to see me and that he thought I had come because I found sick people amusing.”

“He’s lost none of his sense of humor. Did he tug at your heartstrings?”

“Somewhat.” Her eyes clouded over as she turned to gaze at Patrick. A doctor arrived on a ten-speed bicycle and shot past very close, so that for a moment the air was filled with bay rum.

“Let’s go.”

They drove toward Claire’s place. Patrick told her about the condition of its interior, the carcasses, the bottles.

Claire turned on the radio. “The girls all look prettier at closing time.” “I wish things would lighten up,” she said. “I know we’re grown and all. But I’d like to dance my ass off.”

“Tell me about it.”

“We’ll survive this. But what is that worth?”

Patrick remembered Germany when the drugged girls were carried screaming from the cafés, the sense of flames in the doorways, the nerve net hanging vulnerable in empty space. Now the space was turning to enclosure and that was probably what Claire meant by wanting to dance her ass off. He wasn’t sure; but it had her quality of saying the right thing.

She was not prepared for the inside of the house. While Patrick raced around filling plastic bags, Claire flung open the windows, upstairs and down. Soon the wind coursed through the place, carrying flies and stink to blue eternity. When Patrick went upstairs he could see a shadow below, just as when Tio had paced the night of their dinner. At the top of the stairs was a photograph of Claire’s wedding. She looked quite the same, except that in the photograph she wore her hair in an old-fashioned chignon; but perhaps that was just the style of wedding pictures, the photographer hoping to give his work a lasting quality by suggesting the newlyweds had died some time ago.

The curtains in the big bedroom stood straight out the window in the breeze. Reports fluttered under paperweights. Claire made the bed with fresh sheets and said, “Would you like to stay with me tonight?”

There was no sense that her husband haunted the room, and Patrick said yes. Then they stopped the chores and sat in the window seat holding hands. They could see down to the meadows. The hay had recently been mown and lay in windrows drying and waiting to be baled. They looked at the varied yellow triangles as closely as if they awaited something crossing them. What could that have been? No telling; but it did seem the setting for a mythical creature or a fugitive.

“May I see your breasts?”

Claire smiled and undid her shirt, dropping it around her waist without untucking it from her pants. Patrick’s heart pounded. They were small and definite, like a girl’s; and their pallor against the tan of her shoulders and face made them seem secret and powerful. She pulled her shirt on. “Chilly.”

“Thank you.”

“Hadn’t you looked before?”

“I was swept away.”

“I see. So was I.”

“Does one ever just say the hell with it?”

“The hell with what?” she asked.

“The consequences.”

“Some people do,” she said, without much warmth for those people.

“Did you ever want someone so much you didn’t make love because you’d be too close to see them?”

“That hasn’t happened, but I think it’s not impossible. I guess that would be adoration.”

A harrier hawk flew low against the meadows, banking and casting on new angles in the wind.

“How much of you is there left?” Patrick asked.

“I’d be the last to know. How much of you is left?”

“Well, my major foray into self-pity is the belief that it’s all left,” Patrick said.

“I certainly don’t have that belief. You have to have lost a thing or two along the way.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Okay, but you’re a very silly boy. And certainly don’t embarrass yourself for me by listing the things you’ve lost and left behind.”

“It’s fair.”

“So it’s agreed, we’re going dancing.”

“I’d love to,” said Patrick, lying reversed on the bed, leaning on his elbows, facing Claire’s closet. Claire was trying on clothes for him. She had immense vanity, enhanced by the sunny pleasure she took from it. Patrick thought, I could never make this up. He tried to puzzle out the pretty petulance of women picking through their clothes, as though every blouse, every slip or dress, seemed to personally let them down a little. Claire held a spangled silk blouse up to her eyes and said, “What in the world could I have been thinking?” Finally she lay on the floor to pull on a pair of tight jeans. She put on a pair of rose-and-silver high-heeled shoes, a silver belt and a loose silk top with short sleeves. This had all been quite measured. Patrick was cotton-mouthed.

“And you mustn’t get terribly drunk.”

“I won’t.”

“And if I see you starting, I will ask you to stop.”

“How?”

“As proof of your love. As proof of how mortally serious it is to go dancing.”

“Then it will work. Where shall we go?”

“The Northbranch.”

That was the spot all right; but it would make an unmistakable announcement that would fly through Deadrock.

“It’s not exactly a hideout.”

“I’m not ashamed.”

Unless you’re on the dance floor under the wagon wheels and lights, you have to walk sideways in the Northbranch on a Saturday night; and inevitably, to get a drink you have to wedge into the service bar and irritate the barmaids. Then when you dance you have to leave your drink on someone’s table, and it is considered to be in the tradition of the West for others to finish your drink for you while you are away.

No amount of lovemaking replaces dancing, though there’s a connection. The band played “Faded Love,” then “Please Release Me” and “The Window up Above.” Patrick and Claire slow-danced to a fiddler with a smoky, reminiscent style and to the singing of a short man whose Stetson couldn’t quite hide all his baldness and whose voice was fine and deliberate and haunting as trains in distant night.

Claire seemed strong and light as Patrick held her, curving his hand around her back and holding her hand rather formally and elevated. She rested her face straight against his chest. A few people stared; but the dancing continued, the whole crowded floor graduating slowly in a circle. Young cowboy couples with their hands in each other’s back pockets and toothpicks in their hat brims; older people in fox-trot postures with crazily fixed expressions; indifferent couples counting the house or watching Patrick and Claire; a drunk in a green suit, his hand upraised, his index finger extended, trying and failing to cut in: these and others were bound to the slow circle toward the music. Patrick could feel Claire’s back expand now and then with a sigh. Then some gruesome story-song commenced about dogs and children and watermelon wine. They left the floor.

They managed to find a spot at the bar. In the mirror Patrick could see Calamity Jane and remembered being here last: love and death: Claire and the sled dog Dirk. The bartender came up.

“Man wants to buy you both a drink.”

“Thank you,” said Patrick and ordered. “Who is it?”

“He phoned it in from the hospital. Man down there’s gonna cover for him.”

Man down there was Deke Patwell. Weak waves, Deke with a little painted grin. I don’t know and I don’t care, thought Patrick. Claire had been watching. Deke must have phoned the hospital with the latest.

“Do you want to throw up and go to sleep?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

“Shall we dance?”

“Yes.”

They were back in the dense wheel, a hundred faces strangely anesthetized by three cheating songs in a row. It seemed unlucky.

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m going to be able to stand it,” said Claire. “Just.”

“Won’t you go with me somewhere a long way off?”

“No.”

The little flame lights overhead lent the place a peculiar ecclesiastic air. Patrick couldn’t remember why. It seemed in the Bible there were always flames dancing over things and that the flames were meant to be a positive sign. These dusty light bulbs weren’t going to be quite all that. But there, after all, was Claire’s imaginary precursor, the impossibly ugly Calamity Jane in the clothing of a scout. However, the latest song from the bandstand referred to two-timers as snakes crawling in the night. Patrick remembered Tio calling over the phone that he was down among the snakes; and that when you threw the dice they always came up snake eyes.

“Claire, do you fear Tio?”

“I know him too well.”

“Most people are murdered by people they know well. Do you think you’re in any danger from him?”

“If I am, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You sound like my sister,” said Patrick; then he remembered that he had it exactly wrong, that it was Mary who had accused him of being more fatal than any Hindu. “Actually, I’m not right about that,” he said. “You’re more like me.”

They danced from cheating to trucks to lost love to faded love again, which seemed sadder than lost love, to the green grass of home, double beds, jobs you could shove, a ride to San Antone, yellow roses, the Other One, caring and trees. Claire put her arms around him and began to cry. She said, “Oh baby, do something.” When the first, most ardent wave had passed over him, he thought, and not without fear or confusion but still shot through with ardor, This is it.

“If we could only remember …” Patrick trailed off with the quality of dramaturgical preplanning; but then, helplessly, having at this moment seemed inauthentic even to himself, he just doggedly fell silent, because he was certain that if they both could remember any of their original intentions, something would occasion a rescue, something astral; but not, certainly, this assaying of present requirements. A former captain of tanks encounters a former Oklahoma golden girl still actively married to a current person of the oil, with difficulties, none of which appear on the apparatus: What values shall we assign to each, that is, from loyalty to practicality to romance? Do we subtract for the premature curtailment of tank? Do we dock for nonamplification of golden-girlism? Do we quantify our reservations as to the nondocumentable nature of oilperson’s helpless flaws? How about this: Altruistic cowboy tank captain rescues princess of the Cimarron from mock-epileptic oil-and-gas-lease scoundrel. No, well … no. But if we could only remember. Anyway, Claire caught that, knew the long thought was genuine, even if the deck was stacked and, for her as for practically everybody, the matter of remembering first intentions was as reproachful as anything could be. The road to hell has seen more paving materials than the Appian Way, I-90 and A-1-A combined.

“Okay, let’s buck up here now.”

“Very well,” she said.

“Are we at the crossroads?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can one have fun at the crossroads?”

“I have had no reports as to that,” she said.

“For instance, having disguised myself as a nurse, shall I pull Tio’s various life-support connections?”

“There are none.”

“But if there were.”

“There aren’t.”

“Ball breaker.”

“Now, now.”

Of course, they were trying to work themselves into a reckless state of mind, a form of play in the face of grave consequences familiar to the bandits and thrill-killers of history. This time it wasn’t working. It was undemonstrated that Claire lacked love for Tio. It was not clear that Patrick had a plan. Most of all, everything with respect of the heart’s grave and eternal sweep seemed at odds with the constant machine-gunning of the age.

“I do love you,” she said so fatally as to put it beside desolations he had already come to know, ones which played human hope against arithmetic and impossibility. Meanwhile it seemed that not only was Patrick drunk but he was about to break down. Who wanted to go dancing and put up with this?

“I know what you’re thinking. But you’re going to have to pull yourself together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cheer up.” It was the only thing she could have said to return Patrick to the ground and make him stop circulating with ghosts and faulty desire. A car crashed outside and there was a long jingle of glass, a stuck horn.

“They’re playing our song,” said a revitalized Patrick, sweeping Claire to the floor for a turn.