Heartache and Other Natural Shocks (33 page)

“Yeah,” she says. But she’s not listening to me. And now she’s kind of freaking me out ’cause she looks all waxy and slumped over, like a zombie in
Night of the Living Dead
. Maybe she’s in shock, or maybe she’s drunk. Either way, if Ma were here, she wouldn’t leave Julia all alone because Ma takes care of everyone. And maybe I’m not Ma, and I’m dead tired, and I have a whole bloody house to clean, but still, I know how to do the right thing. So, I plunk myself into that uncomfortable chair and I force myself to say something nice. “Julia, Geoff’s going to be fine,” I tell her.

Julia sinks lower in her seat. “He only came to the party because of me.”

“Oh, I see. So this is your fault? That’s what you’re saying?”

Julia nods. “If it wasn’t for me, he would’ve been at home running lines.”

“Well, that’s just stupid, Julia,” I say, “because if it wasn’t for me, Ian would’ve been having hot sex instead of losing his temper and beating the crap out of Geoff, but that kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere, does it.”

Julia sighs. “Everything has consequences,” she says. “Everything is connected.” I roll my eyes. “If Pierre Laporte hadn’t been murdered, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

“Yeah. So what’s your point?” I say.

She shrugs. “It’s like Newton’s third law in science. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So maybe we’re all part of a chain reaction, just complex packages of molecules acting and reacting to each other, like tiny metal balls pinging around a giant pinball game.”

I stare into Julia’s spacey face. Is she really spouting philosophy at me, at one o’clock in the fucking morning? Well, two can play the philosophy game. I say,
“O mangiar questa minestra o saltar questa finestra.”
Julia looks at me, baffled. I translate. “Either eat this soup, or jump out the window.”

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“I learned it from a wise old woman,” I say. “It means take it or leave it. Look, Julia, whether you’re a pinball or a molecule, the world doesn’t revolve around you. So why don’t you just stop blaming yourself for everything, and let’s go home and get some sleep.”

But she won’t come, so what can I do? I buy her a coffee from the vending machine and lend her money for cab fare.
I tell her that I’ll leave my back door unlocked, so she has a place to go to, if she wants. I ask her to let me know about Geoff. Then I drive home through the dark empty streets, wondering how so much can go wrong in one night.

“Slippin’ into Darkness”

Hanging out in a hospital waiting room is like living in time-lapse photography; no one seems to move, yet every time I look around, someone is gone, or someone new is sitting there, or the hands on the clock have jumped half an hour. Finally, after Geoff has been taken for X-rays, I’m allowed to see him. He’s in one of those narrow, curtained-off cubicles, wearing a hospital gown, lying under a thin pale-blue sheet. The blood has been cleaned off his face, so the damage is more visible now: swollen left eye, a cut on the brow, a scrape on the chin. His face is puffy and bruising. “How’re you doing?” I ask.

“It only hurts when I breathe,” Geoff says. He tries for a smile, but it’s more like a grimace.

I stand by the bed. “Can I get you something?”

“A new body?”

“Steve McQueen or Kris Kristofferson?”

Geoff chuckles, but the pain grabs him. “No jokes,” he says.

“But if I can’t make you laugh, life’s not worth living.”

Geoff blows out a breath. “I’ll be fine when the drugs kick in. They think it’s just cracked ribs.”

“Just?” I say. “And the shiner?”

“Nothing a little pancake makeup won’t take care of.”

“You can’t be serious.”

But he is. “I did not spend my whole year practicing for
Hamlet
just to watch it go down the drain.”

“Geoff, you can’t move without hurting.”

“That’s why some genius invented drugs,” he says. “Drugs and tape. If Sarah Bernhardt could perform after one of her legs was amputated, certainly I can get onstage with a little crack in my ribs.” He takes a shallow, painful breath. “I have four days to recover.”

“Three and a half. But even if you could do it, Mr. Gabor will never let Ian onstage after this.”

“Why not?”

“Because he beat you up,” I say pointedly.

“Says who?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jules, it was too dark to see.” I stare at Geoff like he’s out of his mind. He says, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Without Ian, there’s no play. I need Ian, and Ian needs me. I’m not telling anyone. Not even Clarissa, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay,” I say sharply. “It’s just a play.”

“Not to me.”

“Well, I’m not going along with this.”

Geoff reaches for my hand and stares at me with his one good eye. “Yes, you are. You won’t say a word. ’Cause you’re my best friend.”

The X-rays show two fractured ribs on his right side, which wouldn’t normally keep a person in the hospital, but because of the concussion, the doctor wants him to stay overnight. Geoff is wheeled to another floor, to a shared room. An elderly man is in the other bed. It’s quieter here than in Emergency. Geoff is drugged, and he drifts off.

The nurse says I should go home now, but
home
has become a confusing word. My house is sold. Monique sleeps in my parents’ bed.
Home
is fragmented and realigned. Even tiny words like
us
suddenly have new meanings. Small adjustments in vocabulary, like shifting tectonic plates, have seismic consequences.

I take a seat under the florescent lights outside Geoff’s room. My eyes feel scratchy. Time creeps along the edges of the wall. The black hands on the clock jerk spasmodically. Hamlet whispers:

I flip through stacks of outdated magazines. I pick up an old
National Geographic
and look at pictures of camel trains
in the Rajasthan desert. Camel trains. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t travel by camel the antithesis of travel by train? Animal, iron. Ancient world, modern world.

Oxymoron
. What a strange word. It’s like someone was a moron for thinking it up. I turn the page, and a camel’s goofy, loutish face stares back at me with its black languid eyes, long lashes and grinning lips. What an odd creature. On the opposite page is a pullout photograph of a line of camels plodding across golden dunes beneath a relentless cobalt-blue sky. I wish I could be there, so far away: desert, dust, heat, the tinny clank of metal cups and the creak of heavy packs. I blink.

Ding
. I open my eyes. It’s 3:25 and at the end of the hall, the elevator doors slide open. A tall slim man strides out. He’s in his mid-forties and has a handsome movie star face. He walks over to the nurses’ station, talks with the nurse and then walks down the hall in my direction. There’s something familiar about him. I rub my eyes. For a moment, I can’t place him, but then I recognize him. He’s the man from the stone house in The Beaches. The man with the perfect family. Funny how people’s lives intersect. I wonder if someone in his family has had an accident too.

The man walks into Geoff’s room. Ah, he must be the elderly man’s son. After a few moments, he comes back out and looks down at me. “Hello,” he says.

“Hello,” I say.

“And you are …?”

“Jules. I’m a friend of that boy in there. Geoff Jones.”

The man nods. “Where’s Clarissa?”

I scrunch up my forehead. “What?”

“Do you know where Clarissa is?” he repeats.

I shake my head. “She’s not here.” How does this man know Clarissa?

The man sighs impatiently. I look up into his hazel eyes. His eyes are exactly the same color as Geoff’s. He could practically be Geoff’s dad. And then I realize he
is
Geoff’s dad. The nurses phoned him. That’s why he’s here. That’s why Geoff parks in front of his house. He’s been spying on his own father. Oh God! Why didn’t he tell me?

I stare at Keith Jones’s handsome face. “You look so much like Geoff,” I say.

“Apparently so,” Dr. Jones replies.

“He was beaten up.”

“I read the chart. Look,” he says, “can you give Clarissa a message? Just tell her that Keith came by. If she needs to get in touch with me, call my office.
Not
my home. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thank you,” he says. He turns away.

“Wait,” I say. “You’re not staying?”

“No,” he says. He strides down the hall.

“But don’t you want to talk to him?” I call out. Keith Jones doesn’t look back. His footsteps echo off the tile. My voice comes out shrill and loud. “He would want to talk to you!”

The nurse steps out into the hall. She glances from me to Dr. Jones. The elevator swallows him up. It’s 3:37. He was here for all of twelve minutes.

I blink. I look back down the empty hall. Did I dream this? Can this be real? What heartless, cruel man was that? My head pounds. My body is a pillar of steel. Lights hum and flicker above me. Ghosts rise up from the dead. And there is Hamlet, huddled in the corner in his black cloak, churning, grieving, soul raging at the injustice of it, while his father’s ghost calls out for revenge:
O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!

And Hamlet’s words come to me:
“O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!”

“Everybody Plays the Fool”

All day Sunday, I make like Cinderella in the house: scrubbing, washing, vacuuming, dusting. I use every cleaning solution I can find. When I attack the grease stain on the living room carpet, I pretend it’s Ian’s face, and I scrub really, really hard. How dare he ruin this for everyone! Even himself. After all the rehearsals and all that work. So what if Geoff’s a crappy fencer? Hamlet carries the whole damn play, and Geoff is an amazing Hamlet. So who gives a shit if he’s gay?

Around mid-morning, a blue Cadillac pulls up next door—Loverboy!—and Mrs. Epstein and Bobby are dropped off. Ten minutes later, they’re at my front door. Mrs. Epstein is clutching a piece of paper in her fist. She asks if I have any idea where Julia is.

I sigh. “Yeah, as a matter of fact I do.” I give her the pared-down version of the fight. I don’t mention Ian by name. As soon as she hears about Julia staying at the hospital with Geoff, Mrs. Epstein tears off in her car, leaving Bobby with me. Well, things are getting “curiouser and curiouser,” but Deb and Mar don’t call me the Queen of the Interrogation Room for nothing.

“So tell me about your weekend,” I say to Bobby. And before you know it, the whole story spills out. Apparently, “Doctor Loverboy” is Mrs. Epstein’s boss, and he invited them up to his cottage for the weekend, but something must have gone terribly wrong because suddenly, this morning, she was packed and ready to go. Bobby didn’t even get to try out the sauna, and no one talked on the drive home. Then his mom found a note on her pillow, and she phoned Bobby’s dad in Montreal. There was a lot of yelling and crying. And now Bobby doesn’t know what the heck is going on. He wants to know when Buzz is coming back.

“Tomorrow,” I tell him. Bobby looks bummed.

An hour later, Mrs. Epstein and Julia drive up. I walk Bobby back to his house, hoping for the inside scoop. Mrs. Epstein tells me that Geoff has two broken ribs. Damn! I ask to see Julia, but Mrs. Epstein says she needs to rest.

Meanwhile, my phone is ringing off the hook. Everyone wants to know what’s going on. Debbie says she heard that Ian spent the night at Jim’s place. Jim swears that the two of them left the party before Geoff got beat up. Jason says he heard that one of the guys at the party belongs to the Hells Angels, and maybe
he
beat Geoff up. People are saying Ian is going to be expelled;
Hamlet
is going to be canceled; Geoff is in a coma; Geoff is paralyzed for life. Where the hell do they get this stuff? After a while, I stop answering the phone. Only Julia knows what’s going on, and so far, she’s not talking.