Pearl (27 page)

26

They lie on the twin beds, side by side, reading. Joseph is reading his biography of Ruskin, Maria her weeks-old copies of
The Economist
. She would like to ask him to lend her his book, but she restrains herself. She has always found any book he was reading more appetizing than anything she might be reading at the same time, and the old
Economist
s provide no savor at all. She congratulates herself for not even hinting that he give her the book.

Joseph knows, too, that she would like to read his Ruskin book; he retreats into a pocket of what he knows is selfishness, but he will not give it to her, not this book he is so enjoying, this life he has entered into, so absorbing, so puzzling, so admirable and tragic—no, he won’t give it up for her, even though it is possibly the thing he could do right now that would be of most help.

“I feel so trapped here,” Maria says. “I don’t dare leave the phone, but I can’t get anyone in New York. Jill Kiernan’s in the fucking Caribbean. She’s my lawyer friend with the Irish connections. Jesus Christ, the Caribbean. Everyone’s a goddam yuppie now. We slept in youth hostels with knapsacks, for Christ’s sake.”

“I have an idea,” Joseph says. “I swear I won’t tell anyone in New York. It’s five o’clock, you’re jet-lagged; let’s go have dinner downstairs. They can get you if anyone calls. Our first early bird specials.”

Joseph, as you see, has not much gift for lightness. When he tries to make a joke, it often falls flat. People who aren’t taken with Joseph and Pearl often think they have no sense of humor. Maria, who is good at jokes, has never said that, never even allowed herself to think it. On the other hand, she doesn’t even notice that he’s tried to be funny. “All right,” she says, “we might as well.”

They go down to the room where Maria had breakfast, the room that at all hours smells of beer. They order grilled salmon, baked potatoes, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio in which neither of them has faith.

“I thought my love would keep her safe,” Maria says. “I thought if I just loved her enough, she’d be all right. God knows I love her enough. But she’s not all right, Joseph, because she thinks life is terrible and she wants to die.”

“She won’t die,” he says. “I think the doctor knows what she’s doing.”

“The doctor!” Maria snorts. “Dr. Congeniality.”

“She seems competent,” he said. “Anyway, Pearl’s safe for now.”

“For now?”

“That’s all we can hope for. For now she’s OK. Have another glass of wine. You need to sleep tonight.”

.  .  .  

When Maria gets into bed, she’s surprised at how much she wants to give in to her fatigue. How much she wants sleep. But only the right kind. Clean sleep. Not too much, not so that, waking, she’s groggier than before she slept. She needs to be rested to fight for Pearl. And for her own rights, her right to be with her daughter. Her daughter who needs her. Fatigue will weaken her; fatigue will dilute her force. Fatigue kills hope. And she must act from hope. She must breathe hope back into her child. Hope breathed in through love. Absurd, the professional hygienics of the doctor, believing that with her skill, her training, she can provide an alternative to love. It is love and life that are at issue. Not specialty, subspecialty, eating disorders, invasive procedures, feeding tubes. Yet these are what is keeping Pearl alive.

Maria knows that if she falls into one of her poisoned sleeps, one of the ones that is a vision of what is behind the scrim of our words, our civilized habits, she will be paralyzed. She will be in the place she needs to rescue Pearl from, and she cannot allow that to happen. She will not sleep.

.  .  .  

Upstairs in room 436, Joseph has no impulse to sleep at all. He wonders whether Pearl is able to sleep. He reads about John Ruskin. Ruskin traveled through Europe with his parents, carrying with him a portable England: tools for geological expeditions, equipment for drawing, an instrument for measuring the blue of the sky, called the cyanometer. He wonders in what terms the blue of the sky is measured. What is the measure for intensity?

What is the intensity of Pearl’s suffering? What does she need him to do? What can he offer her that will be of help, that will be strong enough to pull her back into the orbit of life? How can he protect her? He couldn’t protect Devorah from her own failure of spirit, from the heel that caught in the hem of her skirt. He thinks that in all his life he has prevented nothing, he has made nothing happen. He would do anything for Pearl, anything that would keep her safe. But he can’t think of a thing.

27

“The potassium levels are much better,” a doctor says to a nurse. “You might want to take a look at this,” he says to Tom. Tom comes toward the bed. The doctor moves the sheets; they are looking at the bag attached to the tube coming from Pearl’s vagina. She is embarrassed that Tom is seeing this. “We’ve got a nice urine output here; it’s brilliant.”

Pearl would like to laugh. Brilliant to be producing urine.

“Morrisey’s cut the Midazolam down. She’ll be more with the program now. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re getting there.”

Out of the woods. Out of what woods? What woods has she been in? There are no trees; there have never been trees. She has been here in this room that is not white but that feels white, windowless, dim, the lights making a bluish haze over everything, so that she has no idea of season or of time. Christmas. It’s Christmastime.

But what does time mean to her, since the medication—Midazolam—has turned her into a being without memory? What is time without memory? Who is the
I
without a past? Is it possible to have an
I
for whom the present is continuous, eternal, like the dead, or God, or Joseph’s mother, rocking and gibbering in the Regina Caeli Home for the Aged and Infirm? Pearl is not the same person that she was several hours ago. Her memory has been robbed. Who, then, is she now?

There are tubes in her arm, her nose, her vagina. She is seeing things more clearly: the horses are doctors. And something new is happening: something she hasn’t felt for many weeks. She is hungry. She is thinking of the rice pudding her mother makes, creamy and sweet, with raisins and cinnamon. How can she be thinking of raisins and cinnamon when she is so close to death? Her companion at the end of the white road has disappeared. There is only a blankness that she fears, a windless, treeless plain. They say they are giving her back her life. What they call her life she knows by another name: hunger, it is called.

I must tell you something strange, strange yet a scientific fact. The paradox: as a starving person is given nutrition, she becomes aware of hunger, an awareness that was blocked when the starvation progressed to a critical state. Like other starving people, Pearl had not felt hunger; now, fed, she has begun to crave.

How can we understand this? Don’t we believe, hasn’t everything we’ve experienced taught us to believe, that nourishment diminishes hunger rather than increasing it? Is appetite fed on food? Must we make the one-to-one equation between appetite and life?

I find it fortunate that Pearl isn’t thinking of these things. She is thinking only of the arrival of hunger. And its companions: fear and shame.

28

Maria waits till seven the next morning, which is when she knows breakfast is served, to phone Joseph. Ridiculous how meals have become the major events of her day. Like a prisoner, she thinks, or a mental patient, or a person in an old-age home.

After breakfast, Joseph asks Maria if she’d like to go for a walk; he’ll man the phones. She refuses. He asks if she minds if he goes. No, of course, she says, go on.

He comes back with a book by Ngaio Marsh and two decks of playing cards. She cannot seem to read, but she can play gin rummy.

He thinks of playing cards with his mother.

Every hour, Maria phones Dr. Morrisey. And every hour she is told the same thing: The doctor is unavailable. There is nothing to report. The doctor will return your call when she is free.

“I’m going to go out and get us some sandwiches for lunch,” Joseph says. “That hotel bar is just too grim. Even this room is better.”

“I’ll be here,” Maria says.

Joseph walks out of the hotel, his book heavy in his pocket. Odd, he thinks, to be reading about John Ruskin in Dublin. The Irish humor, the Irish generosity, the Irish sense of chance and miracle would have exasperated him. And why would anyone, he imagines Ruskin thinking—he for whom the eye was all—go to a country he believed populated by dirty, superstitious beggars, a country whose great buildings could be counted on one hand, a country whose mountains lacked sublimity, a country with only minor ruins?

Joseph has only three hours for a glimpse of Dublin, a situation Ruskin would have thought barbarous. Most likely it is, he thinks, but then I am a barbarian. Unrefined. “That’s very fine,” he hears Dr. Meyers’s voice saying, a phrase that had the power to abash or to exalt him. He wonders what Seymour Meyers would think of what his granddaughter has done. He would applaud the impulse—martyrdom—but not the terms in which it was expressed—human despair. He would have thought despair a sin. So much, of course, is in the terms. The terms determine what we see. For the first time, he makes the connection between
term
and
determine
.

What is knowing? What can be known, really known? What does it mean to know well? Ruskin knew some things well, and yet his blind spots made much of his knowing unreliable. And is knowing living? What is living? How do you understand a life? What does Pearl understand by this thing she seems so willing to give up?

He is tormented by the idea that he doesn’t know what to do for her. Maria has been told she can do nothing, but she knows what she’ll do when she’s allowed. Maria wants him here to help keep Pearl alive. What does Pearl want? He is here to do whatever it is she wants, and whatever Maria wants. Suppose the two are different?

The air is wet and tastes of iron, or of coins. There is a smell to it that he knows he has never smelled before, yet it seems deeply familiar: sweetish, smoky, something like wood or coal yet with more soil to it. A smell with a deep brown color: is this peat? As he walks, the smell seems curative, quieteningly modest. He feels it slowing his pace.

He will ask the way to Trinity College. No, he will not. He will look at the jade-colored river, the scarlet and sapphire doors.

But as he walks, his heart drops with the sense of his own failure. He doesn’t know how to look without guidance. Without an idea anterior to sight, without a context provided, not from his own imagination or experience but from the imagination and experience of someone else, he doesn’t know how to look. He doesn’t know what to look
for.
This makes him seem pathetic to himself. How can he become a person with a greatness of response, like Ruskin? When something pleases his eye here, he has no words for the terms by which he is pleased. The gold lettering on a store window, the shiny-green blue or red paint on a door: how should he compare these to other things that have pleased him? The things that please him here seem merely
pleasant,
and his inability to see more in them makes him feel that he has failed.

But what is he doing, thinking about Ruskin, when he is in Dublin because Pearl is trying to die? Perhaps this is his punishment; he cannot look because it is wrong for him to be looking at all. But what is right? Waiting; waiting and praying. Only he is a person who has long ago given up the possibility of prayer.

The air is raw and damp; it is the end of December. The cold of the pavement seeps through his new Italian shoes. He would like a hot drink. He imagines tea will be good in Ireland.

He walks into a café that beckons him because of its suggestion of Victorian—no, Edwardian—gentility. Cakes and scones sit solidly, reassuringly, on plates with pedestals. They offer a solid comfort without the risk of alarm or surprise. He chooses tea and cheese sandwiches and takes them to the cash register, fumbling with the unfamiliar coins. No one is impatient. The young woman at the register fishes the right amount from his open palm; he is not unpleased by the touch of her warmish fingers, at the slight grazing of her light-pink polished nails.

A waitress in a black uniform and a white maid’s cap wipes the marble surface of his table with a damp blue-and-white checkered rag.

“Desperate, isn’t it?” she says. “Perishing.”

For a minute he wonders if she knows something about Pearl. But then he understands she’s only talking about the weather. He can’t get over her easy, colloquial use of the words or their cognates:
desperate, perish
.

Desperate: to be without hope. Perish from
perdere:
to lose, to be lost. To be lost and without hope: such large, truthful ideas about the nature of life. He very much likes what it suggests about a culture, that such concepts can be so domesticated, so simplified, as to apply to weather.

“It’s not so bad,” he says, smiling.

“You’re a brave man,” she says, with a smile and an intake of breath that could be a sigh, a sign of agreement, or disagreement.

He looks around him. He listens to the buzz of talk for what he thinks of as a distinguishing tone. People here are not nearly so good-looking as they are in Italy, maybe because it’s rainy and cold. But no, it’s more than that. No haircut here is a work of art. Teeth do not flash in triumph; eyebrows don’t suggest a later assignation or an upcoming fistfight or a quick, mutually profitable deal. There is laughter, but it isn’t dangerous. No knives gleam in this laughter; no outraged honor bubbles at its surface. Voices aren’t raised. Yet there’s not the fuzzy mutedness of London tearooms; he knows he must imagine bloodlettings here, but such imagination would require work.

Men sit alone at tables and read newspapers; women too. And some of them read books. They regularly light up cigarettes. One woman takes a flake of tobacco off her tongue.

A waitress stands beside him with a brown teapot and offers to fill his cup. The steamy air of the room has made the wisps escaping her chignon go softly curly. Her upper lip, which has a light dusting of down—traces only, bee pollen—is dampened a bit by sweat. He imagines that if he embraced her, the smell of her armpits would be pleasantly rank: an overworked young animal’s. He likes the whiteness of her fingers, and the dark blue stone of her ring, and the greenish vein that travels up the inside of her arm.

So that is what I have become, he thinks, a man of a certain age, a widower, thinking of the details of the body of the young girl who brings me tea.

“You’re American?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’d say Americans have the right end of the stick about most things. I’d love to go over there.”

Does she imagine him as her sugar daddy? A pathetic older man who will usher her into prosperity, a life without a maid’s cap, a damp rag? What is he thinking? What has become of him?

“Many people are disappointed when they actually get to America,” he says.

“I wouldn’t be, I know. I’ve got two sisters there, in Boston. You’re not from Boston yourself?”

“New York.”

“I’d be that terrified of New York.”

“It’s not unsafe, really.”

He thinks of how dull he must be for her to talk to, how disappointing.

“If I went, I’d like to go someplace warm. LA, maybe, or New Orleans. But I won’t go anytime soon. My mother’d be completely destroyed to send another kid there. There’s only me and my brother left. He’s much younger than me. Ten years old, and a right gurrier.”

Joseph has, simultaneously, no notion of what a gurrier might be and at the same time a clear image of a light-haired stocky boy running down a sidewalk, fists clenched, cheeks red, legs pumping, making a roaring noise.

“I have no siblings myself,” he says, and then feels ridiculous at the suggestion that he and she are in a position so that anything about them could be compared.

“Large families are grand, or they can be if you’ve the means. Have you children yourself?”

“No, I’m a widower.”

“Well, then, you’re on your own,” she says, her damp cheeks turning pink. He’s embarrassed her with excessive information, the implied plea for sympathy.

“I travel a great deal.”

“That’s grand for you then,” she says. He can tell she’s eager to get away.

He finishes his tea, his cheese sandwiches. He tips the waitress lavishly. She blushes once again.

“Give my regards to Broadway,” she says, raising her hand as if she were waving him off as he sailed away.