Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (12 page)

 
          
 
''Everybody seems 'up' here,"
Preston
said. "Everybody but her." He
pointed ahead to Cheryl.

 
          
 
Lewis nodded. "Poor baby. She's
twenty-two. She's got cirrhosis. They've already done two liver biopsies, and
the tissue they got was dead both times. They want to do another one, but she's
terrified that if they pull another dead plug it'll be her death sentence. You
can live with half your liver gone, even two thirds, but if three quarters is
nothing but scar tissue, then it's just a question of when."

 
          
 
"How do you get cirrhosis at
twenty-two?"

 
          
 
"Well, one fabulous way is to start at
fourteen putting nothing—nothing—in your mouth but beer." He opened the
door and held it for
Preston
, and they walked down the corridor toward
the lecture room. "She knows what it'll be like. Both her parents went
that way: confusion, disorientation, hallucinations—they come from ammonia the
liver won't process—then maybe coma, maybe not, then probably esophageal
varices."

 
          
 
''A what?"

 
          
 
"The liver can't handle anything more, so
it shunts it all by. All the blood goes up through the esophagus. Basically,
you puke away your life blood. All of it."

 
          
 
Jesus Christ!
Preston
felt his blood draining into his shoes.
They reached the door to the lecture room, and
Preston
leaned against the jamb and took a deep
breath. He saw Lewis looking at him, concerned, and he tried to smile.
"It's been a long day."

 
          
 
Lewis nodded. "Sensory overload. You've
heard about taking life one day at a time? Cheryl's a little girl who has no
choice. All the shrinks can do is help her appreciate every day as a gift. Not
so easy v/hen you hate yourself so much for trying to kill yourself that you
feel like . . . killing yourself." Lewis paused and looked at
Preston
—gray, weak, clutching the dooijamb. He
winked and said, "Isn't it beautiful? I told you: It makes Mozart's gift
seem almost . . . well, pedestrian."

 
          
 
THE BLACK Daimler circled the roundabout with
the silent grace of a crocodile and stopped before the front door of the
clinic. The chauffeur got out, tugged at his jacket to erase the wrinkles from
the shoulders, and opened one of the back doors.

 
          
 
A young woman stepped out of the car and,
while the chauffeur went to the trunk to fetch her suitcase, stared at the
simple adobe building. She wore sunglasses, though night was well on its way
and stars could already be seen in the violet sky. Her long blond hair gleamed
against her navy blue cashmere sweater. She had not known how to dress for the
occasion, so she had taken her mother's advice—"Make believe it's a
regular hospital, darling. Wear something simple and understated, something
that won't say too much"—and had worn a white silk blouse, a pleated linen
skirt and medium-heel navy pumps to match the sweater. She had left her jewelry
at home, all except her signet pinkie ring and her gold Rolex.

           
 
"It's cold," she said.

 
          
 
"Only at night." The chauffeur shut
the trunk. "I don't imagine you'll have much call to be outside at
night."

 
          
 
"No."

 
          
 
Carrying the suitcase, the chauffeur started
toward the building, but the young woman took a couple of quick steps and
caught up with him and put a hand on his arm.

 
          
 
"I'll take it," she said. "I'd
rather."

 
          
 
"Of course." He handed her the
suitcase and tipped his hat and said, "Good luck, Miss 'Cilia."

 
          
 
"Thank you, Simpson. For
everything."

 
          
 
The lobby was empty; the two offices on the
left were dark. A light shone in an office to the right, so she set her
suitcase down and walked to the office door. A large woman in a white uniform
sat at a desk, making notes on a file in a manila folder. She sensed a presence
at the door and looked up.

 
          
 
"Hello, dearie." She grinned.
"Checking in?"

 
          
 
The young woman nodded, and the nurse gestured
to a chair beside her desk.

 
          
 
"I'm Nurse Bridget. And you're . . . ?"

 
          
 
"Godfrey . . . Priscilla Godfrey?"

 
          
 
"Oh yes." She opened a drawer and
searched for an admission form.

 
          
 
Priscilla noticed an ashtray on the nurse's
desk. She opened her purse, took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it with
a gold butane lighter.

 
          
 
Nurse Bridget waited until Priscilla had
returned the lighter to her purse. Then she took Priscilla's free hand in hers
and looked at it. The fingernails had been bitten to the nubs, the skin around
them ravaged and scarred.

 
          
 
“I’m sure glad you’re here, dearie," she
said.

 
          
 
Priscilla snatched her hand back and buried it
in the pleats of her skirt.

 
          
 
Nurse Bridget stood, reached across the desk
and, gently, removed Priscilla's sunglasses. "You won't be needing
these," she said. "You won't have to hide anything, ever again."

 
          
 
"Hi, Guy!" fifty voices shouted in
ragged unison.

 
          
 
Preston
,
Lewis, Duke and Hector sat in the back row of the lecture room. The director of
the clinic, Guy Larkin, stood before a podium at the front. Behind him was a
blackboard on which someone had chalked "Korsakoff's Syndrome."

 
          
 
Preston
looked at the backs of the people in front of him. There were T-shirts and
sport shirts, heads of long shaggy hair and heads of close-cropped gray. An
elderly woman was knitting.

 
          
 
Preston
heard a subdued belch to his right. He turned his head and saw Hector nibbling
at a cigarette.

 
          
 
Larkin smiled broadly and said, "Dr.
Lapidus was scheduled to speak tonight about the effects of ethyl alcohol on
the encoding of memory engrams—Korsakoffs Syndrome. But there's been a
last-minute change."

 
          
 
"Oh, damn!" someone said.

 
          
 
Someone else said, "My friggin' favorite,
too."

 
          
 
Larkin held up a hand for silence. Then, with
a flourish reminiscent of a camey barker introducing a two-headed woman, he rolled
his wrist and extended his arm to a side door and proclaimed, "Ladies and
gentlemen . . . Stone Banner!"

 
          
 
The side door sprang open and in ran—ran—the
man who had done more than any other (with the possible exception of John
Wayne) to cement the modem myths about the American West.

 
          
 
As Stone Banner took the podium and Larkin
descended to a seat in the front row and most of the audience applauded
reflexively, Lewis bent to Preston and whispered, "Isn't he gorgeous?''

 
          
 
It wasn't the word
Preston
would have chosen, but he guessed it was
appropriate. Officially sixty years old. Banner could have made a credible case
for being anywhere from forty-five to seventy. He was deeply tanned,
glamorously craggy, flat-bellied and fit. His mane of silver hair played nicely
against the trove of gold that decorated him: a gold chain with gold crucifix
around his neck, on one wrist a gold elephant-hair bracelet and on the other a
gold chain-link bracelet, and gold rings on each pinky. He wore a silk shirt
open to his sternum, tailored jeans and high-gloss cowboy boots.

 
          
 
"Please, please." Banner held up his
hands to quell the applause. "There are no stars here. We're all brothers
and sisters in recovery." He closed his arms and raised his arms like
Jimmy Swaggart and began, in his resonant baritone, "God, grant me the
serenity ..."

 
          
 
While the congregation chanted, Lewis bowed
his head and whispered to
Preston
,
"You know he's a miracle of modem surgery.''

 
          
 
"How so?"

 
          
 
"He's had so many lifts, they're worried
if they try one more, the strain'll be too much and his nose'll fall off."

 
          
 
When the prayer was done. Banner hooked one
thumb in a belt loop, rested his other hand on the podium and turned his head
slowly from side to side, making brief eye contact with everyone in the room.
Preston
noticed that Banner knew instinctively how
to stand so that the overhead light highlighted his features and made him look
like a Remington sculpture.

 
          
 
"It's a high," Banner began, "a
really great natural high to see all the new faces here, all the new lives
about to begin. You may be scared, but let me tell you: Stone Banner was
scared, believe it or not. You may be lonely, but Stone Banner remembers the
loneliness . . . the shakes and the horrors."

 
          
 
What about the third-person rule? Does he
remember that? Where's the compulsory T? Or, because it's our candy store, are
we allowed to indulge ourselves in regal syntax? Preston watched Banner as he
recited the litany of his addiction—Preston didn't have to listen, for the
words were predictable, the circumstances and situations only slightly more
colorful than those experienced by ordinary mortals, the end inevitable (the
retired cowboy riding into the sunset on a cloud of cocaine and vodka)—and he
sensed that he was being treated not to a confession but to a performance:
gestures melodramatic, choked pauses perfectly timed, shy smiles pleading for
understanding.

 
          
 
''So there I was, in my private black hole,
and suddenly I realized: I can't do it alone. And I looked up into the sky"—Banner
looked up at the acoustic-tiled ceiling—"and I said, 'I can't do it, God,
can you?' And He did."

 
          
 
Banner smiled, and Guy Larkin applauded, which
was the signal for everyone else to applaud.

 
          
 
"But I didn't come here tonight to bore
you with my drunkography," Banner said. "I came here on a special
mission. Normally, our graduations are done in the privacy of our own units,
but tonight we're going to have a love-in. We're going to celebrate the
graduation of a truly great lady. Ladies and gentlemen . . . brothers and
sisters . . . please join me in ... in appreciating my friend . . . your friend
. . . Natasha G.!"

 
          
 
Banner stepped back, gestured at the side door
and clapped his hands.

 
          
 
The side door flew open, and with a wave and a
grin, Natasha Grant wafted into the room.

 
          
 
Preston
said, "My God!"

 
          
 
Lewis said, “Oh my!"

 
          
 
Duke said, “And to think: I could’ve fallen on
her . . . right on top of her. It would've been easy."

 
          
 
What they saw now was the Natasha Grant not of
fact but of fantasy, transformed, it seemed, by a legion of magicians. The
bulges of suet were gone, the pasty complexion was now rosy, the frazzled
Brillo hair was now a pillow of shining waves and curls. Her lips were a
glistening magenta invitation. She pointed them at the audience and silently
mouthed the words "I love you."

 
          
 
Banner hugged Natasha, and she offered him her
cheek and permitted his lips to pass within a millimeter of it. Then they
parted and turned to the audience, and Banner held her hand and said, *'The journey
isn't easy for any of us, but for some of us it's doubly hard. Some people, the
public, see a silver spoon in our mouths, but they don't know that that spoon
can choke us." He flashed a smile at Natasha. "Natasha G. was
literally born in a trunk. ..."

 
          
 
Natasha G. How cute. Pseudoanonymity. And as
Banner started down Natasha's memory lane,
Preston
fancied a therapy session among public
figures: Ronald R. , meet Ayatollah K., who overdosed on God. Ron had a reality
problem, fried his brain with sweet dreams . . .

 
          
 
The door behind
Preston
opened and quickly closed, and a woman sat
in the empty chair across the aisle. He would not have bothered to look up if
he hadn't smelled her. He recognized her perfume, a rich and spicy fragrance
that, for reasons he had never questioned, had always triggered his erotic
reflexes. It was called Opium. So he did look up, and for probably the
twentieth time that day he vowed to apologize to the young author he had
defamed as pretentious. Once again he felt he had been punched in the soul.

 
          
 
She was beautiful. No, that wasn't enough. She
was his ideal. She was all the passions of his youth in one manifestation:
Donna Reed and Lizabeth Scott and Lauren Bacall, Scarlett O'Hara and Puccini's
Mimi, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. She was purity and perfection,
recklessness and vulnerability.