The Listening Walls

2.

A doctor arrived before eight, a small, jaunty man with a red camellia in his buttonhole. He seemed to know what to expect; his examination was perfunctory, his questions brief. He gave Wilma a small red capsule and a teaspoon of a viscous peach-colored liquid, the remains of which he left on the bureau for future administration.

Afterward, he talked to Amy in the sitting room adjoining the bedroom. “Your friend, Mrs. Wyatt, is very high-strung.”

“Yes, I know.”

“She claims to have been poisoned.”

“Oh, that’s simply her nerves.”

“I think not.”

“No one would want to poison poor Wilma.”

“No? Well, that’s not for me to say.” The doctor smiled. He had friendly eyes, the sheen and color of horehound. “But she has, in effect, been poisoned. Her malady is very common among visitors — turista, it is called, among other less reputable names.”

“The water...?”

“That, yes, but also the change of diet, injudicious eating, the altitude. The medicine I left for her is a new antibiotic which should take care of her digestive problems. The altitude is a different matter. Even to please the tourist trade, we cannot alter it. So here you are at approximately 7400 feet when you are accustomed to sea level. San Francisco, I believe you said?”

“Yes.”

“It is particularly hard on your friend because she is suffering from high blood pressure. Such people are inclined to be overactive by nature, and at this altitude overactivity can be most unwise. Mrs. Wyatt must be more cautious. Impress that on her.”

Amy did not point out that nobody had been able to impress anything on Wilma for years; but she sighed, and the doctor seemed to understand.

“Explain a little, anyway,” he said. “My countrymen do not take their siestas out of sheer laziness, as the comic strips would have you believe. The siesta is a sensible health precaution under our circumstances of living. You must so advise your friend.”

“Wilma doesn’t like to lie down in the daytime. She says it’s procrastination.”

“And so it is. A little procrastination is exactly what she requires.”

“Well, I’ll do my best,” Amy said, sounding as if her best would be only a slight improvement over her worst. In fact, it seemed to Amy that the two sometimes got mixed up, and her best turned out disastrous and her worst not so bad.

The doctor’s eyes moved back and forth across her face as if they were reading lines. “There’s another possibility,” he said, “if you’re not pressed for time.”

“What is it?”

“You might go down to Cuernavaca for a few days and give your friend a chance to acclimatize more gradually.”

“How do you spell that?”

He spelled it and she wrote it down on a little steel-backed pad with a magnetized pen attached. Rupert had given her the set because she couldn’t keep track of pens and was always having to write notes with an eyebrow pencil or even a lipstick. The lipstick ones were necessarily abbreviated. R: G.G.w.M B’k s’n. A. Only Rupert could have deciphered this to mean that Amy had taken the Scottie, Mack, to Golden Gate Park for a run and would be back soon.

“Cuernavaca,” the doctor said, “is only about an hour’s drive, but it’s some three thousand feet closer to sea level. Pretty town, lovely climate.”

“I’ll tell Mrs. Wyatt about it when she wakes up.”

“Which probably won’t be until tomorrow morning.”

“She hasn’t had any dinner.”

“I don’t think she’ll miss it,” the doctor said with a dry little smile. “You, on the other hand, look as if you need something to eat.”

It seemed heartless to admit to hunger with Wilma ill, so Amy shook her head. “Oh, I’m not really hungry.”

“The dining room remains open until midnight. Avoid raw fruit and vegetables. A steak would be good, no condiments. A Scotch and soda, but no fancy cocktails.”

“I can’t very well leave Wilma.”

“Why not?”

“Suppose she wakes up and needs help.”

“She won’t wake up.” The doctor picked up his medical bag, stepped briskly to the door, and opened it. “Good night, Mrs. Kellogg.”

“I — we haven’t paid you.”

“My charges will be added to your hotel bill.”

“Oh. Well, thank you very much, Dr...?”

“Lopez.” He presented his card with a neat little bow and closed the door behind him loudly and firmly as if to prove his point that Wilma wouldn’t wake up.

The card read, Dr. Ernest Lopez, Paseo Reforma, 510, Tel. 11-24-14.

He left behind him a faint smell of disinfectant. While he’d been in the room the smell had been rather reassuring to Amy: germs were being killed, viruses were falling by the wayside, bad little bugs were breathing their last. But without the doctor’s presence, the smell became disturbing, as if it had been put there to cover up older, subtler smells of decay, like spices on rotten meat.

Amy crossed the room and opened the grilled door of the balcony. The sound from the avenida was deafening, as if everyone in the city, fresh and rested after a siesta, had suddenly erupted with excitement and noise. It had rained, briefly but heavily, during the late afternoon. The streets were still glistening and the air was thin and crisp and pure. It seemed to Amy like very healthful air, until she remembered Wilma’s high blood pressure. Then she closed the door again quickly, as if she half believed that the room was pressurized and she could shut out the altitude with a pane of glass and some iron grilling.

“Poor Wilma,” she said aloud, but the sound didn’t emerge the way she intended it to. It came out, tight and small, from between clenched teeth.

She heard her own voice betraying her friendship, and she walked away from it with guilty haste, toward the bedroom.

Wilma was asleep, still wearing her red silk suit, and her bracelets, and her golden eyelids. She looked dead enough to bury.

Amy switched off the lamp and went back to the living room. It was eight o’clock. Across the avenida a church bell began to toll, striving to be heard above the clang of trolley cars and the horns of taxis. Back home it was only six o’clock, Amy thought. Rupert would still be working in the garden, with Mack nearby stalking butterflies and Jerusalem crickets, and letting them go, of course, if he caught any, because Scotties were very civilized dogs. Or, if the fog had moved in from the bay, the two of them would be inside, Rupert reading the Sunday papers in the den, with Mack perched on the back of his chair looking gloomily over Rupert’s shoulder as if he took a very dim view of what was going on in the world.

The big man and the little dog seemed so vivid, so close, that when the knock came on the door she jumped in shock at the intrusion on her private world.

She opened the door, expecting only the girl with the towels again. But it was an elderly Mexican man carrying an object loosely wrapped in newspaper.

“Here is the box the señora ordered this afternoon.”

“I didn’t order any box.”

“The other señora. She wished it initialed. I bring it in person, not trusting my no-good son-in-law.” He removed the newspaper carefully as if he were unveiling a statue. “It is a beautiful box. Everyone agrees?”

“It’s lovely,” Amy said.

“The purest silver. None purer. Feel how heavy.”

He handed her the hammered silver box. She almost dropped it, its weight was so unexpected in spite of his warning.

He grinned with delight. “You see? The purest of silver. The señora said it looks like the sea. I have never see the sea. I make a box that looks like the sea and I have never see the sea. How is it possible?”

“Mrs. Wyatt — the señora is asleep right now. I’ll give it to her when she wakes up.” Amy hesitated. “The box is paid for?”

“The box, yes. My services, no. I am an old man. I run like lightning through the streets, not trusting my no- good son-in-law. I run all the way here so the señora would have her beautiful box tonight. She said, ‘Señor, this box is of such beauty I cannot bear to be without it for one night.’ ”

It was practically the last thing on earth Wilma would have said but Amy was in no mood to argue.

“For the señoras,” he added righteously, “I run anywhere. Even though I am an old man I run.”

“Would four pes—”

“A very old man. With much family trouble and a bad kidney.”

In spite of his age and infirmity and running through the streets he seemed ready to talk at considerable length. She gave him six pesos, knowing it was too much, just to get rid of him.

She put the box on the coffee table, wondering why Wilma, who always made such a fuss about being charged for extraweight baggage on planes, should have bought so heavy an object, and for whom it was intended. Probably for herself, Amy thought. Wilma rarely squandered money on other people unless she was in an elated mood, and God knew there was no evidence of that on this trip.

She opened the box. The initials were on the inside of the lid, engraved so elaborately that she had difficulty deciphering them. R.J.K.

“R.J.K.” She repeated the letters aloud as if to clarify them and to conjure up an image to match them. But the only R.J.K. she could think of was Rupert, and it didn’t seem likely that Wilma would buy so expensive a gift for Rupert. Most of the time Amy’s husband and her best friend were barely civil to each other.