American Appetites Page 12

  Two ambulance attendants were strapping Glynnis to the stretcher, and then they were lifting her, glass crackling underfoot. The precision of their movements, their practiced coordination, reminded Ian of a crewing team plying oars in perfect unhesitating rhythm. They bore Glynnis out to the ambulance and Ian hurried panting beside them, pleading with them to hurry, to hurry, to hurry.

  One of the police officers was saying, Just a minute, mister, how’d all this happen? How’d she go through that window?

  An accident. We’ve had an accident.

  What kind of accident, mister?

  The window—

  Yes, mister?

  The window broke—

  Yes? By itself, the window broke?

  —and my wife fell, and—

  Fell? How?

  —fell, and hit the ground—

  Fell, mister? Or was pushed?

  They were escorting Ian to the ambulance though he had no need of their assistance. His legs were strangely elastic and seemed distant from him, yet under his control. His head was ringing and buzzing but all his thoughts were clear, lucid . . . logical. He was thinking that Glynnis’s kitchen knives were all finely honed for she could not bear a dull knife; no serious cook can bear a dull knife; he had bought her a knife sharpener for Christmas a dozen years ago when Bianca was a child, and Bianca had begged to sharpen her mommy’s knives for her . . . that whirring grinding noise, and the faint aromatic smell that arose from it . . . how captivated the child had been! And if the knife in Glynnis’s hand had been razor sharp, and if Ian had closed his fingers around it to wrench it from her, and if he’d shoved her from him violently, to free himself of her, and if she’d fallen against the window, and if the window had shattered, and if she was badly hurt, if, even, she were to die . . . none of this had any bearing upon what had really happened. It had no bearing at all upon either of them.

  STILL, THE BLADE had been sharp; the cuts went deep. Ian wondered indifferently if he had severed nerves, bone; if his hand, already stiff as a claw, would ever mend.

  2.

  He waited, waited for news: watching the slow red second hand of the clock high on the wall, sitting for as long as he could bear it and then standing, and walking about the lounge, and out into the corridor, several times out of the hospital altogether, into the night, which smelled of something like asphalt . . . cold, damp, brackish. They had offered him a cot in the emergency room, empty at this hour of the morning, but he preferred the waiting room, preferred the anxiety of his vigil. By degrees the sedative was wearing off. His heart began to leap again, to kick against his ribs.

  And how many times that night he hurried to the lavatory . . . needing suddenly, with no warning, to urinate, as if his bladder were pinched. And afterward, his discomfort at being unable to wash his hands, running hot water over his left hand alone. He was thinking of Bianca: the time she’d fallen on the playground at school and broken three fingers. Had it been the left hand or the right? Poor baby; poor love. A plump-cheeked pretty child with startled-looking eyes, slate blue for a while, then shading, like his own, to gray. As a little girl she’d been intelligent enough but sometimes maddeningly clumsy, graceless, rather loud, eager to please yet, if not pleasing, just as inclined to be sullen; with a look, as Glynnis said, teasing, of having swallowed a toad. They’d been happiest, though, in those years; Glynnis had thrived on motherhood, had loved not only her little girl but her little girl’s friends, a bedlam of little girls at times, really quite amazing. Ian would return in the late afternoon to a kitchen full of them, and a smell of baking cookies—chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal, gingerbread—and Glynnis smiling flush-faced and beautiful in their midst: Look what we’ve made. Now Glynnis resented it that Bianca seemed to prefer her father, and that Ian was “undemanding” of Bianca; it was an old quarrel, an old charge: his attitude was a form of male condescension, she said, if not scorn. And Ian protested; you’re being unfair, you’re being absurd. I love Bianca as she is.

  And Glynnis said, Yes. That’s the problem.

  Toward morning he went to stand for a while in the parking lot, staring at the sky as if waiting for a revelation. The long night was ending, dissolving, an orangish-pink light radiating from the horizon like something spilled, Ian thought, in water.

  He seemed then to know that Glynnis would be all right; for was it not inconceivable, after all, that she not be . . . ? Years ago, in Cambridge, driving their feisty little red Volkswagen, she had banged her head on the windshield in a minor accident, and naturally they had worried but nothing came of it except, a day or two later, one of her mysterious migraine headaches, the kind that left her exhausted, sweating, eyes streaming tears. The accident had been an ambiguous one: the driver ahead of Glynnis had braked his car suddenly and Glynnis collided with it, damaging its rear and the front of her own car; blame lay with Glynnis for tailgating, though it would seem to have been as much the other driver’s fault. There had been some unpleasantness, but the insurance company finally paid and the matter was settled. And Glynnis said, chastened, I’ve learned my lesson: I must keep my distance from the car in front of me, and I must wear my seat belt.

  WHEN DR. FLAX IN his surgeon’s green gown came to speak with him, Ian woke, groggy and fearful, having fallen asleep only minutes before on a chair in the waiting room. He struggled to his feet, anxious yet outwardly composed, and began nodding as Flax spoke, in that quick, vague way of his that often annoyed Glynnis, for it seemed to suggest that he wasn’t listening carefully. Flax told him that, so far as he could judge, the operation had gone well; they had every reason to be optimistic. There had been considerable trauma to the brain, exacerbated by the amount of alcohol Glynnis had ingested, but the arterial damage turned out to be less severe than the CAT-scan had indicated. “Your wife is unconscious now, of course, but she will probably begin waking by mid- or late morning. You should be able to see her then.”

  Ian stared at Flax, wondered if there was something more he should be told. Or something he should ask.

  He said, “Do you think she will make a full recovery?”

  Flax hesitated only a fraction of a moment, then said, “Frankly, I don’t know. We won’t know for a while. Why don’t we just hope for the best?”

  “Yes,” Ian said numbly. “We’ll hope for the best.”

  He was advised then to go home, to sleep for two or three hours before returning to the hospital; but Ian did not want to go home and did not want to think about why he did not want to go home. Now that it was fully morning, past seven o’clock, he had telephone calls he must make . . . to Bianca at Wesleyan and to Glynnis’s sister, Kate, who could, if she thought it necessary, telephone relatives of Glynnis’s. And he would call the Grinnells, and the Kuhns, and the Olivers, and Martha Fairchild, who would tell people at the Institute and cancel Ian’s appointments for the next several days.

  And one of the calls would be to the glass and mirror shop on Charter Street, the one that did emergency repairs. He would have a new plate-glass window installed, Ian thought, that very day: well in advance of Glynnis’s return home.

  3.

  In her high bed in the intensive care ward, a translucent tube snaking up into her left nostril and others attached to the soft flesh of her inner arms, Glynnis lay immobile except for her breath, which was hoarse, labored, and arrhythmic. Her heartbeat was monitored; her shaved head and much of her face were swathed in bandages tight as a nun’s wimple. Had Ian not been shown to her bedside he might have stumbled past her, unrecognizing. He drew a deep sharp breath, astounded. Glynnis? That woman? Within a space of hours she appeared to have aged years.

  So, at her bedside, he waited, waited patiently, holding her hand in his, whispering her name. He had read that absolute unconsciousness does not exist; the anesthetized patient on the operating table hears, and absorbs, what is said within earshot, while being unable of course to respond. When he whispered, “Glynnis?” it seemed to him that, from time to time, her
fingers twitched in response; her eyelids fluttered. He had the impression that she wanted to wake, to speak to him; she was keenly aware of his presence, yet separated from him by a sort of veil, impossible to penetrate. Consciousness was the surface of a body of water of incalculable depth; and unconsciousness was that depth; and Glynnis, a swimmer trapped beneath the surface, was struggling valiantly to rise, but was pulled back, and again struggled to rise, and was again pulled back.

  Yet each time it seemed to Ian that she rose higher and fell back less, that by degrees, by a supreme effort of will, she was making her way to the surface. He spoke her name like an incantation, repeatedly, tirelessly, his eyes fixed upon her face with such concentration that he no longer knew where he was, or even why he was here, what unspeakable turn of destiny had brought them to this: this hospital bed in an intensive care ward that, against one’s natural expectations, was a place of much irreverent bustle and noise. Ian tried not to look toward other beds, at other visitors holding lifeless hands, speaking urgent incantatory words to unhearing ears. He thought, My love will pull her back.

  Shortly after two o’clock, Bianca arrived, breathless and frightened, and sat beside Ian, close by the bed. “My God, my God,” she said in a weak voice, staring at Glynnis, “I just can’t believe this, I just can’t believe this—” until Ian told her to please be still; Glynnis could hear every word.

  It was late afternoon when, at last, Glynnis opened her eyes.

  She looked directly at Ian and squeezed his fingers, or seemed to, in an effort to speak. Her eyes were bloodshot and not altogether in focus yet she seemed to recognize him, he would swear to it that she recognized him. He said excitedly, “Glynnis? Darling? Can you hear me?” Again she squeezed his fingers; the cords in her neck tensed; she stared at him, or toward him, the pupil of the right eye much blacker than that of the left. Bianca sat silent, as if transfixed; Ian was saying, in a low, urgent, crooning voice, “I’m here, I’ll take care of you, don’t be frightened, I’m here and I will never go away. I will never go away.” He stood over her, gripping both her hands in his, promising, pleading, begging. It seemed to him that Glynnis heard and understood, yet could not speak. Ah, could not!

  And finally she closed her eyes. And Bianca, released, burst into tears.

  GLYNNIS DID NOT regain consciousness again that day, or the next, though Ian and Bianca waited expectantly, always hopefully. Then they began to spell each other, a five-hour vigil for Ian, a three-hour vigil for Bianca. It seemed to them that, at any instant, Glynnis would again open her eyes and rouse herself forcibly from the stupor that had settled upon her limbs: would, this time, speak their names; see them.

  But the hours passed, and the days. And it did not, so very mysteriously, happen.

  Ian spoke with Flax, for Flax was the man, clearly, with whom to speak. He asked, “Is Glynnis in a coma? Is that what this condition is—a coma?”

  Flax, frowning, seemed to say yes, unless Flax said no; it was not altogether clear what Flax said, still less what he meant. He spoke slowly and at length, explaining the details of the operation, letting fall remarks that might be interpreted as cautiously optimistic, unless they were guarded or frankly evasive. Ian gathered that Flax was waiting for the return of his partner Pois, a neurologist, who was returning to Hazelton that very day.

  Bianca said of Flax, “If he knew Mommy he’d care more.”

  Ian said, “We have to believe that the man is doing the best he can.”

  SO THE DAYS passed, and they waited and kept their faithful vigil; like several others at bedsides in the intensive care ward, whose sad stories they soon learned but did not consider in terms of their own situation. For Glynnis was younger after all than these luckless (and clearly moribund) patients; her heart and her other vital organs were said to be strong. The changes in her condition that took place were nearly all internal, monitored by machines of exquisite precision and meticulously recorded, in a script and a vocabulary unreadable save to the initiate. The more public terms critical list and coma came to be uttered, but never their precise explanation, still less their cause. Having witnessed Glynnis’s awakening once, Ian and Bianca were certain that they would witness it again. “My wife is a fighter,” Ian said, though this was not a thought he had ever had before in his life, still less uttered; and Bianca agreed, as passionately as if the point had been contested. “Mommy isn’t the kind of woman to just give up.”

  To their friends they said, “Things are more or less the same” or “Things are more or less stable.” It would have made a powerful impression upon Ian, had he the time and the emotional energy to consider it, that so many people in Hazelton, including a number whom he scarcely knew, came forward to offer their services. He understood that Glynnis had many women friends and acquaintances, but he could never have guessed that there were so many, or that, hearing of Glynnis’s condition, they would react with such sympathy and alarm. Tell us what we can do, tell us how we can help, they said, and Ian’s mind went blank, so confronted. The plainest truth was that what anyone could do for him he hardly cared enough to want done.

  He sensed that there was much speculation in Hazelton about what had happened to Glynnis; it was a community in which everyone knew everyone else, or knew of everyone else, and was never loath to know a little more. By way of Denis Grinnell, though without Denis’s seeming to know Ian had not known, he learned that the police officers who had come to the house had not accompanied the ambulance but had in fact been called by their neighbors the Dewalds, who reported having heard screams. “They must have exaggerated it,” Denis said; “—what they heard, I mean.”

  “I suppose so,” Ian said slowly. He was stricken with shame and alarm. Had Glynnis screamed? Had he screamed? He could not remember.

  IN THE INTERSTICES of visiting hours at the hospital, Ian fell into the pattern of seeking out Flax, when Flax was there to be sought out. He saw the neurosurgeon as a counterpart of himself, a highly bred professional man, nervously attuned to his public reputation, outwardly affable, amiable, yet made of a steely substance that might be made to bend if confronted with a like substance in another man. Ian surprised himself, and, no doubt, Flax, by the audacity with which he hounded the man, surrendering, as the days so bafflingly passed and there was no change in Glynnis’s condition, all vestiges of pride, tact, diplomacy, and even honor: as if Flax stood between him and his wife’s recovery. He reminded himself of those men, and some women, who courted Ian McCullough with the hope of appropriating from him some degree of his power; as if, by a mere gesture of generosity on his part, he could grant them the means of altering their lives. He acquired medical books, neurological books, back issues of the New England Journal of Medicine from a neighbor of his who was an obstetrician, and with the manic intensity that had characterized his work in graduate school, but rarely since, he became an amateur expert, though very amateur, of brain anatomy and pathology and the latest microsurgical techniques. He came to believe that Glynnis should be operated on another time and did not like it that Flax resisted; told Ian, in fact quite bluntly, that another operation would be pointless. “I can’t accept that,” Ian said. Flax said, not unkindly, “You will.”

  At his most desperate, Ian McCullough was likely to be his most cerebral and abstract. If Flax would not, or could not, talk helpfully of Glynnis, he would ask of him questions of a philosophical nature: “Where, Doctor, does the soul reside? Is it generated by the brain, or filtered through the brain, or is it the brain?” And: “I have not read Plato in years, but isn’t it in the Phaedo that proof is offered of the immortality of the soul? What do you think of Plato’s proof, Doctor? Is it just fantasy, or is there something to it?” At such times, waylaying Flax in a corridor or in the parking lot behind the Center, Ian made an effort to hide the fact that his eyes brimmed with feeling and his hands shook.

  Flax had nothing to say about the soul but offered to write Ian a prescription for the tranquilizer Librium, which, in the extremity
of his need, Ian accepted. He’d heard that the tranquilizer should not be taken beyond two weeks, since it was quickly habit forming, but he reasoned that by that time Glynnis would have recovered or begun to recover. By that time he’d have no need of Librium, or of Flax, apart from settling the bill.

  BIANCA SAID QUIETLY, “You just want to protect him.”

  Ian said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Her eyes appeared oddly lashless, naked and exposed. Her face looked as if it had been scrubbed with steel wool.

  Bianca said, “You men, you men who run the world, you stick together.”

  “And what on earth does that mean?”

  Bianca made an airy gesture with her hand, a gesture in such mimicry of Glynnis, Ian thought for a mad instant that she was mocking her mother. But, to the contrary, she was altogether serious. She said, regarding Ian levelly across the cafeteria table—they ate many of their meals here, in the pleasantly crowded basement cafeteria of the Hazelton Medical Center—“You cover up for one another’s crimes.”

  The words so took Ian by surprise, he could not reply, and stared at his daughter with a look of hurt, chagrin, dismay. Though Bianca was nineteen years old and physically mature, though she had always received superlative grades in school and was commended by certain of her teachers for her “leadership qualities,” she had always shown a different face, struck a different note, at home. Ian said, gently, “What do you mean, Bianca, by ‘crimes’? Are you suggesting malpractice?”

  “I mean ‘crimes’ in a generic sense,” Bianca said. “The crimes of the patriarchy, which are immeasurable, because they have always been identified as virtues.”

  Ian laughed. “Bianca, really.”

  “The other side of a blessing is a curse, after all,” she said. “Like the Greek word ara, which means prayer but also a curse: The Greeks realized that a curse is after all just a prayer against one’s enemies.”