Sliding Past Vertical (10 page)

But he was a nice guy,
Emerson’s best friend, and they had hours of driving ahead. “So when’s the
wedding?” she asked.

“In May, when I finish my
degree program and she finishes her MBA. We will marry in New Delhi and return
to the States, where I have been considering offers from several very important
laboratories. One in California looks particularly attractive.”

Part of her envied him for
having a plan. “But I still think there’s something awfully medieval about this
marriage thing. Especially for the woman. Being given away to a total stranger,
like an acre of land or a cow.”

“I understand how you might
find it odd, Sarah. It’s not what you are accustomed to. But look at your
American divorce rate. And these are marriages entered into by choosing your
own partner. How can this way be any worse?”

She shuddered, trying to
imagine the type of husband her parents would choose for her. Someone boring,
no doubt, maybe in the insurance business like her father. She saw brown shoes
and an endless rack of neckties. They’d have sex on Saturday nights, meatloaf
on Tuesdays, and a week at the shore every August. And then one night, coming
home from a PTA meeting, she’d drive her mini-van off the side of the nearest
cliff.

“I’d rather take my chances.”

PART 2:
Syracuse, August-October 1987

Chapter 15

It was a room Sarah had slept
in before: a small room with butter-yellow walls sticky from generations of
fingerprints and a warped closet door that wouldn’t stay closed. It smelled of
wet wood, stale cigarettes, and old coffee. Even though the room had been
vacant all summer, the damp, anxious-student smell hadn’t left and probably
never would.

It’s
not like I’m going to be here forever,
Sarah thought, as she pulled on her new nightshirt, a giant
blue tee with the
Penthouse
logo printed
on the breast pocket. Emerson gave it to her when she’d realized that throwing
out what the dealers had ruined left her nothing to sleep in. Even wrapped in
its original plastic, the shirt had assumed the musty funk. It reminded her of
college, when this charmingly shabby neighborhood, this house, this room, and
Emerson had been her refuge from a variety of awful roommates, from bad phone
calls home, from men who failed to live up to her expectations.

In the narrow bedframe sagged
a thin mattress, and the sheet—Emerson’s spare—was worn transparent
in the center. The springs complained as she sat and fluffed up the sad little
pillow a former tenant had left behind. She tried not to think about the
backache she’d have in the morning.

Sarah tossed for a while, trying
to find a comfortable position, a spot that didn’t sag too badly. She gave
sleep a chance but the stubborn bitch eluded her. It was the mattress, the
smell, or maybe the T-shirt, too new from the package and itchy. Maybe it was
the humid night. Or just knowing Emerson inhabited the room across the hall.

His typewriter hummed, and
the clack of the keys, fast then slow then fast, became a kind of dance step. With
a ping and the return of the carriage, it started again.

I’d
never write about you.

Finally, she gave up. She cracked
open her door and knocked softly on his.

“It’s me. Can I come in?”

“Um...sure, I—just a
minute.” She heard a rustle of paper, the scrape of chair against floor, a
thump and then an expletive.

“Em? Are you all right?”

He whipped open the door. “Stubbed
my toe.”

The typewriter still hummed.

There was nothing in the
carriage.

Emerson, wearing a faded robe
over faded pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, reclaimed his desk chair. The only
other seating in the room was an overstuffed Salvation Army chair heaped with
clothing, so she curled up on his bed and wrapped an afghan around her
shoulders, not as much for warmth as for protection.

He waved an open bakery box
at her. She shook her head. He shrugged and plucked out a fat, glazed chocolate
donut. Breaking it into two pieces, he placed half on an empty plate next to
his typewriter and chomped at the half in his hand. Flakes of glaze clung to
his lips. He licked them off and washed the mouthful down with gulps of milk
straight from the carton.

Suddenly Sarah wanted a donut
more than anything. She poked out a hand and there was the box—like old
times when they used to study together late at night. She chose one with pink
frosting and broke off tiny pieces to make it last longer, but it was still
gone too quickly. They passed the milk back and forth and for a long time, said
nothing.

His room hadn’t changed much
since she was there last. It was a little seedier, and a little dingier, like
an undershirt washed too many times. A row of dusty science-fiction novels spanned
the shelf over his desk, which was heaped with a disorder of manila files and
magazines. A tatty blacklight poster adorned his closet door. Snapshots were
tacked to the wall behind his typewriter: one of her, one a school photograph
of a sad-faced, fresh-scrubbed little boy.

She couldn’t bear to think
about Thomas.

The picture of her was one
she’d sent him last year, taken at Boston’s Black and White Ball, a charity
event for creative types. She focused on it and realized the picture had been
cleanly sliced down the middle and all that remained of the artist boyfriend
she’d been so proud of at the time was a disembodied hand on her right
shoulder.

“You couldn’t sleep?” Emerson
said. “Is it the bed? I’ll switch with you. I’ll take my stuff and work in the
other room. Or is that what’s keeping you awake? The typewriter? Is it too
loud?”

I’d
never write about you.

“No, it’s...just restless, I
guess. First night. New bed.” Her gaze landed on a sheaf of typewriter paper
underneath the dictionary on his desk. “What were you working on that I
interrupted?”

He gave a near-imperceptible
start. “Nothing really.”

She grinned, and it felt
forced. “More spray cheese?”

“Not this time.”

“Your short story?”

“Something like that.”

Whatever it was, he seemed
uncomfortable discussing it. Or not discussing it.

She reached for another
donut. So did he. It was so quiet she could hear herself chew.

“I feel like we should be
studying,” she said.

Finally he got it. “Oh.
Right.”

His hesitation made her
acutely aware that they were alone in his room in the middle of the night. That
she was on his bed in a
Penthouse
T-shirt with nothing underneath, one bare calf sticking out of his afghan. She
tucked her leg beneath her and gathered the throw tightly around her body.

His typewriter still hummed.
The pitch of it vibrated through her. Suddenly the air felt close and seedy.
Like Dirk Blade would have walked in any second and taken her like he took his
other women. The walls exhaled hot breath. The narration hung in the air, the
words that had been pounded in testosterone-induced heat against the rubber
carriage of his typewriter. Who knew what he’d hidden from her underneath the
dictionary, what turgid phrases had tangoed into print while she lay in the
dark across the hall, unable to sleep?

Insomnia
isn’t so bad,
she decided. When pursued alone. Across the hall. With the door locked.

“Well, I...think I’ve
bothered you enough for one night,” she said, taking his afghan with her, still
wrapped around her shoulders. “Thanks for the donuts.”

Chapter 16

Sarah woke early, tired, but eager
to start her new life. She wrote off the bizarre feelings of the previous night
as an adjustment period, getting reaccustomed to being around Emerson.

She’d done it once before,
when she returned to college after a summer break and reconstructed a
friendship with him, negotiating the initial speed bump of awkwardness. She could
do it again. This time should be easier. This time she wasn’t a clueless kid
stumbling over shards of his broken heart.

No noise came from the room
across the hall and probably wouldn’t for a while; Emerson didn’t have to be at
work until ten. She dressed quickly and rushed downstairs, hoping to catch Rashid
and have some company for breakfast, but the bottle-green sedan was already
gone from the driveway.

Even through the kitchen’s
greasy yellow drapes, the morning sun betrayed every crumb, crack, and smear.
Things stuck to Sarah’s bare feet. She wiped them one after the other on the
legs of her jeans. The scent of freshly brewed tea lingered. A mug, a spoon,
and a Rose teabag rest glistened in the dish drainer. A note on the coffee pot
gave her Dee Dee flashbacks, and she expected to see a self-help pamphlet and a
list of household chores.

“Instructions for Use” was
written at the top of this note, the letters small and perfect. It certainly wasn’t
Emerson’s handwriting, and until classes began, only the three of them were
living there. Below the coffee pot directive, Rashid mentioned he’d be having a
lunch meeting that day but didn’t currently have dinner plans should the two of
them wish to include him in something.

He’s
cute,
Sarah thought,
and without thinking grabbed a ceramic mug from the cupboard. It whacked
against the door and split cleanly in two—more broken pieces. She left them
in the sink. Maybe later she would glue them back together. With a sigh she took
a new mug, an indestructible plastic one, and followed Rashid’s instructions. She
sat at the table, waiting for the coffee, waiting for the rest of her life to
begin.

It took a while for her to notice
the absence of trolleys and rush hour briskness. There was no Dee Dee,
scolding, primping, and warbling Whitney Houston and Madonna songs off-key. She
heard lawnmowers, the shouts of children at play, and the occasional summer
student, padding toward Westcott Street.

As she poured her coffee, the
mug reminded her of Jay. He’d learned relatively quickly never to give her
something she could break.

Well, with one grave
exception.

She wondered if he would ever
get clean. If he really meant what he had said in the car or had only been
telling her what she wanted to hear.

Just then she heard rustling
upstairs and, soon afterward, the shower. A short while later, Emerson came
down, wearing a tank top and old jeans. The sun glinted on his wet hair. His
shoulders were bigger than she’d remembered, the skin still as pale a fish’s
belly. His face was shiny where he’d shaved it, and he looked tired around the
eyes. She could only imagine how cruelly the sun exposed her.

“Do you really think people can’t
change?” she asked.

He took the carton of milk
out of the refrigerator, and, noticing the broken mug in the sink, put the
pieces in the trash.

“In your case?” he said. “Yes.
You’ll always be Sarah.”

* * * * *

After Emerson left for work,
Sarah spent the rest of her morning settling into his spare room. It didn’t
take long. She had few possessions and little money, so there wasn’t much she could
do. She hung a couple of posters on the walls and rearranged the books in her
milk crates. Nipping down the block, she purchased the bouquet of the day from a
florist and a new mug to replace the one she’d broken. She experimented with
draping Emerson’s afghan in different places: over the tiny bed, over the desk,
and over the closet door that wouldn’t stay closed.

By one o’clock it looked less
like a sad yellow room and more like a decorated sad yellow room.

By two o’clock, she was
restless and considered getting out her résumés and looking for a job. Then she
remembered what Emerson had said over breakfast. His explanation of why Sarah would
always be Sarah.

“You rush into things, so you
don’t realize you’re in trouble until it’s too late.”

Her high school diving coach
had basically said the same thing. Her approach seemed adequate, but she
over-rotated on her entries. An absence of thought as she left the board led to
diving in too fast and too late for correction. From the resulting splash, she
might as well have been doing cannonballs, at least from the judges’ viewpoint.

“Sliding past vertical,” the
coach had called it, shortly before she’d quit the team. She’d put on her last
Speedo and blown her last entry.

The affliction, however,
seemed to have bled into the rest of her life. Or maybe she’d suffered from it
all along and didn’t recognize it until Emerson pointed out the symptoms.

“Look,” Emerson had continued,
in a gentle, patient tone. “I’d be paying rent on the room whether you’re here
or not, so you might as well take advantage of it. Take your time and get a job
you’re not going to hate in six months.”

Why
not take my time,
she thought.
Why not take the opportunity
to do things differently, the right way, now that I’m starting over?

So instead of looking at the
classifieds and fretting if she had the right shade of pantyhose, Sarah decided
the day was too gorgeous to do anything but take a walk. She didn’t feel ready
to see the campus again, to discover that things weren’t where she remembered
leaving them.

Instead she decided to visit
Emerson.

* * * * *

On the way to the infirmary,
Sarah passed block upon block of shabby, postage-stamp lawns and dark, sagging
houses like Emerson’s. It was as if some dour zoning authority had decreed that
housing near the university could only be painted evergreen, brick red, or
chocolate brown. The only light color allowed was a dirty shade of yellow,
frequently used as trim. Was the decorating scheme designed to retain heat in
the winters, Sarah wondered, or so drunk undergrads stumbling home could find
their houses in seven or eight feet of snow?

After all that gloom it was a
relief to come upon the overachieving cheerfulness of the county infirmary, a
squat gray box of a building with gardens, a gazebo, and a man-made duck pond
just off a mum-bordered circular drive. Two elderly women in wheelchairs were
parked beside the pond, in front of a low cement barricade. One was knitting; a
ribbon of the palest blue trailed from her clicking needles. The other flung
what looked like gobs of bread onto the ground. A gang of ducks splash out of
the pond to gobble them, quacking and pecking at each other.

“That’s good, Mrs. Nickerson,
that’s good!” squeaked a teenage girl in a white uniform, who then took the
woman’s arm and guided it toward the water. “Here, throw it this way.”

Sarah watched them for a
moment, swung through the main entrance, and asked the woman at the desk for
Emerson McCann. She was directed to a large, sunny room that smelled like
disinfectant and had a black and white checkerboard floor. There were only a
few patients, some in wheelchairs, some toddling around with walkers, guided by
nurses or visiting family members. She picked out Emerson immediately, by his
orange coveralls. He was kneeling, adjusting something at the footrest of an
old man’s wheelchair. The coveralls resembled the kind prisoners were given.
For visibility, he’d told her, because some of the patients didn’t see so well.
But orange wasn’t his color; it made him look washed out and tired.

“There you go, Charlie,” he said.
“Good as gold.”

She knew the name from
Emerson’s last letter. Already paralyzed from the waist down, he’d just lost a
lung to cancer, which was spreading. She worried about the way Emerson grew so
attached to his patients.

He straightened Charlie’s
useless feet on the rest and smoothed the legs of his trousers. The gestures looked
respectful, almost tender. Less like an orderly and more like a son. She
imagined the many nights Emerson had put his own mother to bed. No wonder he
fell into this job with such resigned ease. From the start, he’d been
accustomed to the work.

Then Charlie mumbled
something while staring directly at her.

“
Who’s
having dinner with you?” Emerson was still on his knees.

Charlie raised a finger
toward Sarah. “My girlfriend,” he said in a raspy voice.

Emerson turned his head,
smiled, and gave her a wink. “No, she’s not your girlfriend,” he told Charlie.
“That’s my friend, Sarah. She’s staying with me for a while. I guess she’s here
to visit us.”

Sarah nodded. Emerson asked
her to come over and say hello. She hesitated. Old people made her nervous, especially
old, sick people. She was doubly afraid of saying the wrong things or even
hurting them, but she didn’t want to be rude.

“Hi, Charlie.”

 
He bowed, as well as one could do in a
wheelchair.

“Emerson’s mentioned you,”
Sarah said.

“Just the good stuff, I
hope.” He had brush-cut silver hair and a deeply creased face, with skin as
thin and dry as paper. His shirt and trousers hung on his bones. He grinned at
her, and she saw how he got all those creases. He still had a bit of the
dashing rogue about him. Probably put the old ladies in a tizzy. It was
breaking her heart to think he’d been given so little time to live. She didn’t
know how Emerson could stand this, being around people he knew were going to
die, and soon. Perhaps he’d gotten used to it. Or walled it off somewhere
inside him.

She didn’t think she’d have
the strength.

“You think she’ll have dinner
with me?” Charlie asked, hiding his mouth with his hand.

Mischief sparkled in Emerson’s
eyes. “Ask her yourself.”

“They’re serving pork chops
tonight,” Charlie told her. “With applesauce.”

“That just happens to be my
favorite,” Sarah said.

* * * * *

Sarah reached for Emerson’s
hand as they walked out to the parking lot after his shift. She felt small and
scared from being around all that sickness and potential death, and wanted
someone to hold on to. During dinner, she tried to pay attention to Charlie as
he told her stories, sometimes interpreted through Emerson. She tried to nod
and smile and act pleasant and interested. But she kept stealing glances at the
others at their cafeteria table, wondering how long each of them had, wondering
if they were ever going home.

Emerson opened her door and came
around to the other side of his car.

“How do you—?” Sarah swallowed
and lowered her voice. “How do you do this? When you know they’re just going to…”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

He sighed as if he’d been
thinking the same thing, and sagged into the driver’s seat, one leg still out
the door. “You never really get used to it. But, hey, it’s a part of life. I
try to make them more comfortable, and make them feel less alone. Some of them
don’t have any family or at least any family that gives a damn about them.” He
paused. “It’s a really lousy place to be when you don’t have anyone.”

She wondered if his patients knew
how lucky they were to have someone like him taking care of them—someone
who gave a damn.

He pushed lank hair off his
forehead. The air was softly dampening, the sun beginning to set. He’d changed
out of the coveralls back into his civvies but still looked tired and washed
out.

“You want to do something?”
he said. “Go to the mall, maybe catch a movie? I think
RoboCop
is still playing. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”
                        

“Don’t you usually write
after work?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I
don’t have to.”

She took a deep breath,
knowing at some point this topic would come up. “You don’t have to change your
life for me just because I’m staying in your house.”

He jabbed his key into the
ignition. “I don’t have to write tonight, okay?”

“I know you don’t have to,
but—”

“I don’t want to. Is that
better? Am I allowed to not write if I don’t want to?”

His tone silenced her. She felt
even smaller and more scared. Afraid that if she looked at him she’d start to
cry, she turned toward the window and saw the duck pond. The gardens. The
gazebo. The squat gray building. The death within. Just then she realized where
he put his grief and knew the walls could only hold so much.