Pearl (35 page)

Joseph is lost to himself, but he doesn’t know it. “He’s gone round the bend,” we might say, and those words would indicate what has happened: we have lost sight of the man we knew, as he has lost sight of himself. He, of course, doesn’t know this, so he is exhilarated by the new man he has become. He feels he has been born again. A new life will be his: of freedom and of beauty. This is what he calls it, these are the words he uses: freedom and beauty. What words would we use? Would we say, instead: This is a kind of madness? He would tell us that we cannot see, as he sees, the vision that came to him while he was looking into the white circle of the early sun.

But he believes Pearl will see as he sees, what he sees. She will share his vision. He will tell her everything, and then he will leave for Rome, where he will search out the place where they will live. Perhaps an abandoned convent: he has heard there are many such now in Italy. He sees a cloister. He sees them walking around the cloister in the afternoons, digesting their light lunch. He hears the plashing of the fountains, sees the slim silver-barked trees.

He knows now what must be done. All at once, the burden of his dirtiness, his soiled shirts and shorts, becomes intolerable. He longs for a shower and a shave. He can imagine the hot coursing water, reassuring him that everything he’s thought of is possible and right. He looks up at the white sun. Light without heat. Light without color. Light without force. Pure light.

42

“I want to see my mother now,” Pearl says to Dr. Morrisey.

“You’re sure you’re ready?” Dr. Morrisey says.

“I want to see her.”

“She may have a strong response. There may be tears, reproaches. You need to be ready for a variety of things.”

“My mother’s not like that.”

The doctor touches the tube sewed to Pearl’s nose. “You’re ready for me to take this out of you? You’re ready to say you are committed to leaving the other tubes in?”

Pearl makes the OK sign.

Dr. Morrisey cuts the stitch under her nose. The sound of snipping is a shock but there is no pain attached. “I hope this will be the last bad thing I’ll be doing to you,” she says, and pulls the tube out of Pearl’s throat. Pearl feels a bit bereft at first, and her throat feels raw, robbed of its newly comfortable false vein.

“I didn’t want your mother to see you that way. I’d say she’s a powerful person to have in your corner.”

Pearl nods her head.

“I’ll stay around. If it seems too much, or you want to be alone again, ring the buzzer and we’ll do whatever you want. You’re in charge: remember that.”

Pearl says, “You don’t know my mother.”

“I’ve met her,” Dr. Morrisey says, “and you’re still in charge. You probably don’t want to hear this, but your mother loves you very much. She very much wants you to get well. None of that means she’ll know how to behave. So you must call the shots.”

The shots, she thinks. What shots? Bang bang, you’re dead.

But who dies? she wonders. She or her mother?

Neither, she thinks. We are both alive.

43

Maria answers the phone that sits on the table beside her bed. It is Dr. Morrisey, whose voice is, for the first time, warm.

“She’s ready to see you now.”

“She wants me?” Maria says humbly, a rejected lover, a cast-off wife invited back.

“She’s asked for you.”

.  .  .  

Maria leaves a message for Joseph but doesn’t wait for Orla to call her a cab. She runs down the road to the taxi rank and tells the cabby to take her to the hospital. Pronto. Where did that word come from? What movie? Whatever it is, the taxi driver has seen the same movie. “Pronto it is,” he says, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

.  .  .  

Maria hears her heels and the doctor’s heels on the linoleum of the corridor; she feels they aren’t walking fast enough, but she can’t think of a way of making the doctor walk faster. Maria knows she must follow the doctor: her low-heeled tan shoes, her blond head, the thin white cloth of her jacket. They don’t speak.

The doctor goes into the room first. Maria stands a bit apart from her. The light in the room is dim and Maria thinks of the words
twilight sleep,
a drug she seems to remember that was intended to anesthetize women in childbirth. The light is bluish, the lamp beside the bed the only illuminating source; the far wall can only be sensed, not seen. She is entering a split cone of darkness, in the center of which only one spot of the visible emerges: the bed, its white sheets only a plane blocked by the doctor’s back.

“Your mother’s here.”

There is no sound and then, Maria sees, Pearl is weeping. Tears are coming down her cheeks, but there is no sound coming from her.

“It’s all right now, love,” Maria says. Her eyes fill with tears too. She sits beside the bed in a turquoise plastic chair and slips her hands through the bars, in between the tubes, and takes Pearl’s hand, gingerly, because a needle is attached to the skin with a Band-Aid.

Maria’s tears are as simple as sweat. Her body doesn’t struggle against them; her throat isn’t choked by sobs; the tears are silent. Her breath comes easily, naturally. The two of them are experiencing the same thing: they are weeping with no sense that anyone will tell them to stop. Grief without struggle, without contradiction.

“I’m hungry,” Pearl says at last. “I want to eat something.”

“Not so fast,” Dr. Morrisey says. “Not immediately.”

She pronounces it
immijitly,
and Maria feels the warning in her voice.

“What would you like to eat when the time comes?” Maria asks.

“Rice pudding,” Pearl whispers.

“A shark-infested rice pudding,” Maria says to her, thinking of a children’s book they both liked. She can’t remember a thing about it but the title. Most children’s books bored her; she couldn’t wait for Pearl to get past them, a secret she hopes she successfully kept. She hated the coyness, the archness, the creation of a falsely pristine or falsely jokey world. She couldn’t wait till it was time for
Jane Eyre.
But Joseph liked children’s books; Joseph read to Pearl a lot when she was little. When Joseph comes, Maria thinks, swallowing her fears for him, she’ll remind him of a shark-infested rice pudding.

“We’ll think about rice pudding in a few days,” the doctor says, and leaves the room.

In the half-light, Maria closes her eyes, lightly holding her daughter’s hand, cool, damp, the nails bluish, or perhaps it is only the light. I am, she thinks, strangely happy. She remembers being happy when she nursed Pearl as a child with a low-grade fever. The same feeling of purposely useful action perfectly completed, and the peace it brought, comes back to her now. A stillness that seemed immaculate because there was nothing else that could possibly be done. An island, a cutting off.

There is no noise but the buzz of the fluorescent light in the hall, which ought to be disturbing but is not. It’s soothing, like the heavy buzz of bees over a field on an August afternoon. She thinks of the words
August afternoon,
and as she thinks of them her eyes close and she feels herself smiling.

Tears are still coursing down Pearl’s face. My body is working now; I can make tears again, she thinks. She is not so unhappy now and, with her mother near her, she is not quite so afraid. She can make tears and she is not alone. But the fear is still there, the fear of what she knows is inside her, the thing that made her want death, the thing that is flesh of her flesh. She thinks of her face, what her face must have been like when she said to Stevie, “How can you be so stupid!” She still has that face. As long as she is alive, she will have it. She is frightened of her own face. She cannot see Stevie. Her mother is with her. Her mother can hold her hand. But she cannot take away her face.

44

When Joseph finally goes back to the hotel, Orla gives him the message: He can come to the hospital and see Pearl. He takes this as a sign. His intuition, earned by two days and nights walking, the tentative noons, the damp cutout moons against the twilight sky, the pastel sunsets, the false-lit darkness, the silvering whiteness of the rising sun: it was all right. It is a great moment now; a great change will come, a liberation. All their lives will be different, and everything will be better than it was. Maria will have to suffer for a while, but that’s not important. Maria is distractible; Maria will get over it; Maria has, for too long, taken too much. What’s important now is what’s best for Pearl.

He enters the hospital room and sees Maria there, her eyes closed. She may be sleeping. She is holding Pearl’s hand, but awkwardly, through the bars. It’s beautiful, of course: mother and child. But that is a misleading beauty. The ancient forms must no longer be obeyed. The new law must come into effect.

Maria gets up and kisses him. She doesn’t ask him where he’s been or say anything about what happened when they last saw each other. She says only, Do you want to be with Pearl?

Are you surprised that she would leave him alone with her daughter without asking him to explain what’s happened between them and where he’s been? For Maria, letting Joseph speak to Pearl was the next thing to be done. And that is how she has always proceeded with her life: do the thing to be done, then the next thing to be done. The only way to get through things is to get on with them.

He says yes, he’d like to be alone with her. His face is sore from a shave with insufficiently hot water and the sting of his sandalwood cologne. He wore it because he knows Pearl likes it. Sometimes she wears it as her own scent. He wonders if people will notice that they wear the same scent or if they’ll assume it’s a natural product of their life together. But they will not be seeing many people: perhaps no one at all.

Her hair is spread out behind her like a fan: gold on white cloth. He leans over to kiss her forehead, which has always been very beautiful to him. Wide, a wide brow leading to her remarkable arched eyebrows, darker than her hair, and thick. She opens her eyes. Her eyes are not dull; her skin is not unhealthy; her head is not a skull but a clean oval, something by Matisse. She smiles at him. Her eyes are calm, not the eyes of torment; her fingers, reaching out to him, are not sticks but the rather blunt fingers he’s seen holding a needle, a pen, a dog’s leash, a hairbrush, a spoon. She is still beautiful. My young queen, he thinks to himself, unembarrassed to be using the word
my
.

He knows everything that needs to be said must be said quickly.

“You’re feeling better.”

“That’s hard to say.”

“You’ve been through a lot.”

She takes his hand with the hand that has a tube taped to it.

“Joseph,” she says. “I’m afraid of things.”

“I know you are,” he says. “I understand.”

“I knew you would. I knew that, whatever I did, you’d understand.”

“I do understand. And I understand what needs to happen next.”

“I can’t even think what will happen next. I don’t know where I’ll go. I guess I have to go back to New York for a while. I suppose I could go back to school eventually, but right now I don’t want to go back to New York, and I don’t want to go back to Wesleyan. I don’t want to stay here, though. I know that’s not possible.”

He hears everything she is saying as a sign that she has been waiting all along, without knowing it, for him to say what he is going to say. Isn’t she asking him to take her away, somewhere far from her old life, her old connections?

“You could go anywhere; you don’t need to think either of going home or going back to school. There are many more places we can think of.”

“I just don’t know how to think right now.”

“You don’t need to. I’ll think for both of us.”

She smiles. “I know I shouldn’t think that’s a good idea, to let someone else think for me, but right now I’m so tired.”

He takes her hand, her ringless hand, the one not taped to a tube.

“I know how unhappy you’ve been, and for so long.”

“It seems like a long time, but it hasn’t been that long really.”

“Probably much longer than you think. As it has been for me.”

It occurs to her that he is going to talk about himself, which might be the first time in her life this has happened. Does he need something from her? That seems strange; she can’t imagine being of any help to anybody now, she feels so weak.

“I didn’t know you’d been unhappy for a long time,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter. We were both unhappy, but we won’t be anymore.”

She’s confused. Why is he saying
we
?

“You must listen to me, Pearl. I know you’ll understand because we always, always understand each other, we always have, and we always will.”

He kneels beside the bed; he puts his mouth close to her head. He cups his hand around her ear; the side of his hand feels hard against her skull. He begins talking, but it isn’t talking, it’s a breathless whisper. Why is he doing this, why is he talking this way, as if there’s something he’s trying to catch, something he’s afraid of not catching? He has never ever spoken this way; his speech has always been deliberate, considered, words chosen as if they were precious, turned over, laid down slowly, and then used. She doesn’t understand the breathlessness behind his voice. And what is he saying? Phrases detach themselves, each one incredible, each one comprehensible. He cannot be saying this. That it came to him while he was walking, that he was walking all night, that he didn’t sleep, and it came to him, looking up at the sky, looking into the sun. He tells her about the white sky, the white stones, the plashing fountains, the trees around the cloister where they will live. He tells her about the protection of the law: that she needs protection and only he can give it. He tells her that marriage is only a story of the law. He assures her he will never touch her. He will marry her only to keep
her safe.

.  .  .  

I told you long ago, at the beginning, that I wished I could protect them, these three people, but I could not. Never would I like to protect them more than now. But I cannot. Joseph has said the things he had to say. There is nothing to be done about it.

Pearl shakes her head back and forth on the pillow. “No no no,” she says. She would like to put her hands in front of her face, her fingers in her ears, but he is holding one of her hands and the other is connected to a tube. What is he saying, what can he possibly mean, what is happening in and to the world? Who is saying those words? Can it be Joseph? Saying,
must
and
must
and
must
. You must do this, we must do this together. In all her life, he has never said she must do anything. You must listen to me. I must protect you. We must get married. Married to Joseph? What could that possibly mean? That they must live together just the two of them, away from the world. Must? Must not? That she must stay away from her mother. That there are things she must not look at. As if she were a child or an invalid. That he must live for her. Meaning that she must live for him?

Something has happened to Joseph, so he is no longer Joseph. Joseph who stood beside her, so she always knew that if she fell, she’d be caught. She was not alone. It was what having a father meant. Now he says he doesn’t want to be a father but a husband. Her husband, but he will not touch her. She must look only at what he arranges for her to look at. They must be closed in together. Claustrated, he says, kneeling beside her, his mouth to her ear, conjugating Latin verbs:
Claudo, claudere, clausus.
Who is this beside her? What can these words mean?

She tries to understand: Joseph has lost his mind. She must be rid of him; he is a danger to her, and she isn’t strong.

Everything she is saying to herself is right: He has lost his mind. Where has it gone, and will he get it back? He is not himself, he is a stranger and a danger to her, and she is right that she isn’t strong. She is right in pushing him away, she couldn’t do anything else. Not in her condition. Not in the condition of having taken the first steps away from her death.

Pearl is right to do what she does, but when I see the effect it has on Joseph I could almost ask her not to. Not to do it. But what could I suggest instead? Nothing. In this situation, there is no right action. Her action is, of all possible actions, the most right.

She pulls her hand from his grip. She holds it up to indicate that he should move far away from her. She wants him far away. He must be kept away. He is not anyone she knows.

“Don’t come near me,” she says.

He doesn’t understand what she’s doing, moving around like this, thrashing like this; she’ll pull the tube out of her hand, the tube connected to the pole with the clear plastic bag with whatever is keeping her alive. She must be kept alive, so he can live for her. Why won’t she be still? When he came in she was still and beautiful. Now she is thrashing.

Her thrashing sets off a buzzer. A young man comes running in. He must have been just by the doorway the whole time. What did he hear? Who is he? She is moving wildly, although the tube attached to the pole limits her range of motion. “Calm down, Pearl,” he says, “it’ll be all right.”

Joseph is startled by the presence of the young man in the room. Shocked. It is one of those moments when a cliché seems to come alive:
I jumped out of my skin
. We say that, don’t we, for the slightest thing: running into someone we haven’t seen since grade school, being cut off by a truck on the highway, catching ourselves in the mirror unawares. But the sight of the young man, who calls Pearl by name, jolts Joseph with a force that makes him feel he has left his body; he sees a skin, kneeling by Pearl’s bed, and it is loathsome, empty: it cannot be anything that he would once have called himself. But of course it is himself. He rises from his knees. A nurse comes into the room.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave,” she says to Joseph. “She seems to be upset. Perhaps two visitors in one day were too much. She seemed fine with her mother. But we’ve overdone it a bit, perhaps.”

The wildness of Pearl’s thrashing makes the phrase
overdone it a bit
seem ridiculous, and he and the nurse both know it. She presses a button and another nurse comes in from the hall. “Best get the doctor,” the first nurse says. The other disappears into the hall. A doctor—a young man, not Hazel Morrisey—comes into the room with a syringe. He injects Pearl. Then he and one of the nurses leave the room.

Maria pushes her way in.

“You must tell me what’s happening,” she says to the other nurse.

“Something’s upset her. We’re just giving her a sedative. We can’t have her pulling the IV out.”

Maria tugs on Joseph’s sleeve, a supplicant, with a starved supplicant’s desperate pull. “What did she say? Did she say anything? Something must have happened. What did she say to you?”

“She didn’t say anything,” he says. He knows himself to be
a liar.

The nurse tells them Dr. Morrisey has said they must go home. She will phone them in the morning. Pearl is sleeping; she’s sedated. Everything is all right for now.

But everything, he knows, is not all right and will never be again. He moves like a man who has just been electrocuted, shocked; his body is flooded with pulses that thrum and burn. He thinks of the words
shock treatment
—a switch is thrown and the madman’s sanity is restored to him. He has been shocked. He would like to fall onto the floor and roll around, bash his head against the wall: anything to stop this terrible sensation.

He lost his mind. The ideas he had, the words he said to Pearl, were the ideas and words of a madman. Now that he is in his right mind, he can see it, and the seeing is unbearable. He wishes he could do something to block the vision.

Maria is trying to understand. “I thought everything was all right. I was so happy; I felt so at peace. Was I wrong, Joseph? Was I completely wrong? I couldn’t have been. But then what happened? What went wrong?”

He sees her trying to find fault in herself, in her behavior. But she can’t find anything wrong, and it wouldn’t occur to her to blame him.

“I thought I understood.”

You did, he wants to say. There was nothing you didn’t understand, and nothing you can understand now.