Acts of Love (7 page)

While Ted showered that night, she quietly dialed the house in Hardison, and hung up when Jonathon answered.

She knew that it was an accident, her getting out. That if it hadn't been for Ted, she would be there still, be there always.

 

A
NN AND
T
ED SETTLED
just outside of Hardison, in a two-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot that they rented fully furnished. The curtains, the carpeting, and the wallpaper were all a geometric pattern of musty browns and ochers from the 1950s and added to the sense that they were living someone else's life in someone else's time. Ann went back to school and to her part-time job in the hospital gift shop, and Ted took a job with a local construction firm.

During those first weeks of marriage, Ann used to drive almost every morning to Jonathon and Estelle's house, park a few blocks away, and slip round to the back windows. Sometimes she caught sight of them reading the paper, wandering about the kitchen, loaded plates in hand—still eating and dressing, the lights still on—and she was bewildered by her past conviction of indispensability. Who had been fooling whom? Confused, she put off the moment of re-entry.

It crossed her mind, too, that she would be unforgiven for her elopement, for her desertion. She knew that they held feuds—with grocers they thought had once tried to cheat them out of two dollars, with parents who had dismissed Jonathon—clutching them, embellishing them for years. After all, they never gave anything away.

When she tried to talk to Ted of her concern, he brushed it aside. He had written to tell his family of his marriage only at her insistence, and the letter had come back with no forwarding address.

“We'll be orphans in spirit if not in fact,” he told her as he took her in his arms.

But that was a sort of freedom, untethered, bereft, that she had never sought, and she shrank instinctively from his brusque readiness to excise any cord that might cause him to trip.

 

O
N HER NEXT DAY OFF
, Ann made a Sacher torte and drove with it resting carefully by her side to Jonathon and Estelle's. This time, she parked in front of the house and rang the bell, something she had never done before.

Jonathon opened the door. “What's the matter, did you forget your keys?”

“No, I just thought…”

“Well, come in.”

She did not kiss him hello. He had never been physical with his daughters, though he reached often and tenderly for Estelle, and a kiss would have embarrassed him, or, worse, become an excuse for his ridicule. They walked in silence past cartons of books that led like a mossy stone wall into the living room, where Estelle sat watching a game show on television.

She turned, smiled briefly at Ann, and went back to her show. Ann, the Sacher torte on her lap, had no choice but to watch along as a woman guessed the meaning of the puzzle and won $4,700. When the theme music piped up, Estelle turned to Ann. “Why don't we go in the back? I'm a little tired.”

Ann followed her mother to the bedroom and waited while she settled onto the edge of her bed.

“Sit,” Estelle said, patting the bed beside her. She took Ann's hands in hers, which were remarkably smooth and unmottled. “Is he good to you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Estelle nodded. “I'm sure there's advice I'm supposed to give you, but I can't think what it might be.”

They sat in silence, hands entwined, the cake beside them, while Estelle tried to remember.

“Your father and I have always been very happy. He is”—she paused, rummaging for the right word, the right explanation for what was essentially inexplicable, that she could literally not imagine herself without this man—“indispensable.” She pursed her lips, dissatisfied with what she had found. “But that's fate, of course. There's nothing you can do about that. Like a cat, it never comes when you call it.” She sighed and leaned back against the headboard. “Maybe you and Ted will have fate, too.”

It sounded like a disease to Ann.

“Luck is almost as good,” Estelle went on, closing her eyes. “You are our luck, you and Sandy. My beautiful little girls.” Her lids fluttered sleepily. “I suppose we should give you a party. Who shall we invite?”

Anne slipped out of the room while Estelle, carried along on a tide of long-forgotten names, Ann's classmates from kindergarten, friends from Estelle's own childhood in Buffalo, fell into a dreamy doze.

 

J
UST ONCE
, Sandy had said to Jonathon, “Don't you think she should see someone? Don't you think we should get her some help?” And he had reached out instantly and slapped her face. “The only thing your mother needs is me,” he said.

 

A
FTER HER GRADUATION
, Ann took a job in the neurosurgery unit of the hospital. It was not a happy place, and there was a high turnover of nurses, who quickly wearied of the insistent prevalence of death that no amount of studying Kübler-Ross had quite prepared them for. Except for a few patients with slipped discs, most had brain tumors, aneurysms, or strokes. Each morning, all through the floor, you could hear patients being asked, “Do you know what year it is? Do you know who's President?” and the low, halting murmur of the disparate answers.

After measuring the fluid that had drained overnight through the long tube from Mrs. DiLorenzo's skull, Ann stood behind the desk in the center of the ICU and scribbled onto her charts. In the corner, two doctors were questioning David Lowenshon, a thirty-seven-year-old man who'd had a cyst in his head drained the night before. Two months ago, he'd had a malignant tumor removed, but it had already grown back. The doctors were telling him jokes, trying to get him to laugh, or at least smile. “I don't remember how to smile,” he replied in a polite, unmodulated voice. In fact, the front side of his brain had been affected, and he did not remember the proper responses to emotions. When the doctors left, he called Ann over and asked for something to read, a book, a magazine, anything. It was an unusual request, few people in the room could hold their heads up much less read, and Ann promised that as soon as she had a free moment she would go in search of something for him. Before she had a chance, though, Mrs. DiLorenzo began crying loudly that she wanted to go home, “The doctor, he tell me to tell you, she's a good girl, let her go,” and two orderlies wheeled in another postop and put him in the empty bed by the door. Then there was lunch to sort out, who got solid foods, who got only liquids, and charting how much they managed to eat. She was mildly aware of David Lowenshon's increasing agitation, but there was nothing she could do. Finally, when she went to apologize, he erupted.

“I asked two hours ago. Two hours ago! Is it too much to ask for, that I have something to read in this hellhole? Are you just lazy or what?”

Ann, tears in her eyes, ran to the waiting room down the hall and found a year-old
National Geographic.

That night, over dinner, when she tried to explain to Ted how the outburst had upset her, he interrupted, “Just tell me one thing, Ann. Is he going to die?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Then give him a break, why don't you?”

 

M
OST OF THE OTHER NURSES
who remained in the unit were a hardy lot who had somehow made their peace with the symptoms, the deaths. They drank together at the local pub, slept with residents at whim. Why not? They knew it could be them in the next bed tomorrow. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we…

When they transferred David Lowenshon downstairs to rehab, Ann visited him after her shift. His parents, a well-meaning, shell-shocked couple, stood mutely by his side, growing increasingly impatient with his inability to heal, as if the cancer growing beneath his skull were a willful rebuke to some flaw in their parenting from years ago that he had just now decided to punish them for. When he tried to talk to them of dying, they looked away and made quick remarks: “Don't talk like that.” Or, “Don't be silly, you're going to be just fine.” And the doctors, when asked, clothed their discomfort in Latin and stressed the fallibility of prognosis.

Only Ann would talk to David Lowenshon about death. They turned it this way and that, its promise and its peril, with an objectivity that she felt bound to match in his presence, as she sat on the edge of his bed with her feet dangling above the sparkling white floor.

“Are you scared?” she asked him, thinking most of her own fear, so overwhelming at times that it seemed to press down on her every movement, every thought, with its iron weight.

“Of death? No.”

And she did not know if his lack of fear was due to the tumor or to something in his own soul worth coveting.

She dreamt of balancing him, his body rigid and brittle as a dried-up board, on top of her forefinger, until he crashed suddenly to her feet—her fault.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we…

 

T
ED'S JOB WITH THE LOCAL CONSTRUCTION
firm was proving more limiting than he had hoped. His boss, Tony Liandris, was not the kind of man who appreciated suggestions from his employees and persisted instead in a stubborn ineptitude that customers, often ignorant of the simplest facets of building, unknowingly were forced to pay for. Ted, a fierce perfectionist in his work, had as much difficulty holding his tongue as he did cloaking his frustration in a manner that might render his opinions more palatable. “I'm not paying you to talk, Waring,” Liandris warned, smirking slightly, with his belly and his money and his big oak desk.

Forced to carry out second-rate plans with second-rate tools, Ted developed a constant low-level anger just beneath the surface of his skin. His co-workers, other young men who did not seem to share Ted's reluctance to cede control or his injured pride, remained polite but wary of him. Lacking his ambition, they were free to see Liandris with an indulgent and apathetic humor that Ted found equally distasteful—part of the glorification of stupidity he saw as the epidemic surrounding him. After refusing their initial offers to go out for a beer after work or shoot a game of pool, Ted was left essentially alone, which was how he had always preferred it.

There was nothing he liked quite so much as that first hour home from work, with Ann, still in her white polyester dress and squishy white shoes, working on a recipe, her lower lip tucked beneath her teeth in concentration, his graph paper and manuals before him on the kitchen table. He had taken to sending away for catalogues from architecture schools in the area, and while she cooked, he read aloud course descriptions, professors' biographies, success stories, and spoke of the joy he would find in implementing plans of his own. “It takes seven years, though,” he said with a sigh. It was not the time that threatened him, but the ways others had undoubtedly filled the past, with books and calculations and internships that he did not have the luxury of.

“You can do anything you want to do.” She turned to him, smiling. “You always have. I have such faith in you.”

It was that faith he loved, had loved from the first moment he saw it in her eyes, a faith no one else had ever had in him. How could he not want to swallow it whole, possess it forever, that unexpurgated faith of hers?

 

T
OWARD THE END
, David Lowenshon stopped recognizing Ann, stopped raising his head with the politeness that had outlasted hope when she walked into his room. Nevertheless, she was certain that his eyes flickered with appreciation when she took his thinning, unresponsive hand in hers on her almost daily visits. On the afternoon when she went to his bed and found it empty, she stood in the doorway, uncomprehending, for a long moment. The bed was tightly made, the night table clear. Nevertheless, she turned to a passing nurse and asked, “Is he having tests?”

“He died this morning.”

“What?”

Nurses did not reassure each other with false words—it was very peaceful, it was for the best—for they had seen, even the youngest of them, the greedy, last-ditch efforts even the sickest patients made to claw and cling to life, beyond dignity, those final horrific rattling gasps for air, futile attempts at gulping down time itself.

“About ten o'clock.”

Ann had been on her break at ten o'clock. Drinking coffee in the cafeteria. She hadn't sensed a thing, had felt no strange soft pulses. She had simply been drinking coffee, thinking about what she would cook for dinner that night.

The next day, leaden, dull, she called in sick and returned to bed.

And the next, unable to move.

By the end of the week, the head nurse of the unit, Cynthia Neary, called her in to her office cubicle to have a chat.

“I have been talking to the people in rehab, and on our own floor. You know, you simply can't take each death so personally. Perhaps you should transfer to a less stressful unit?”

Ann shook her head.

“Well, then, I must strongly suggest that you see one of our counselors. This kind of behavior does not help you, and it certainly does not help our patients.”