Sliding Past Vertical (23 page)

Chapter 38

A day went by, two, three,
and not a word out of Emerson. Sarah called to check on him. He wasn’t home.
She didn’t want to disturb him at the infirmary, so she left a message with one
of the Jordanians. He didn’t call back.

She’d been feeling so
connected to him, like they were becoming friends again since Jay had
inadvertently brought them back together, giving her a chance to heal what her
carelessness had torn.

But she was starting to feel
used and discarded, as if he knew he could come over and unburden himself and
then, with a clear conscience, go back to the rest of his life.

And Daisy.

Giving him the benefit of the
doubt, thinking he might not have gotten the message and realizing she might have
used him a few times as well, she called again.

This time, she got Rashid.

He sounded so excited to hear
from her that she couldn’t bear to tell him she’d called for Emerson. She asked
about his research, and he was eager to talk about it. Then he apologized for being
too busy to come over and cook for her.

“But we will do this very
soon, yes? Just two friends, no big deal?”

“Sure,” she said. After a
polite pause, she inquired about Emerson.

“I don’t see him much. When
he is home he is very quiet and stays in his room.”

“Is he writing?”

“Yes. Nearly every night it’s
the same. Just about the time I go to sleep. I hear his friend’s car leaving,
and then he begins at the typewriter. Sarah, I’m concerned about this book he
is writing. I don’t know who is going to read such a thing, because at the rate
he is going I fear it will be terribly long.”

Still Emerson hadn’t told Rashid
what he really wrote. Well, that was Emerson’s problem. And so was Daisy. She exhaled
in a rush and imagined Emerson sitting at his typewriter, taking notes as Dirk
relived what he’d been doing with Daisy just across the room. It hurt knowing
that only three days ago she’d given him her blessing to do exactly that.

Maybe that was what he’d been
looking for. Not a chance to become friends again, but a way to feel less guilty
about screwing someone else, until Emerson could get over Sarah for good.

“You are still there?” Rashid
said.

“Yeah. I was just thinking.
About our dinner? How’s next Friday?”

Chapter 39

Emerson McCann—passed
over and passed by—was not just always older and sometimes wiser and the
only native English speaker in the house, but also, for a slight discount in
his monthly expenses, collector of rent checks for their landlord.

The next day was March 1, and
he still had an unchecked name in his ledger book.

Mr. Unchecked was still
upstairs, preparing notes for an evening study group.

Emerson lingered over his
supper of leftover pizza, mentally preparing himself to face him. He hated
nagging people for money, especially friends, especially people who used to be
friends.

He had little to say to Rashid
these days. He’d been fairly good about keeping his distance from both of them.
Sarah was easier; she lived a mile away and worked downtown. Rashid was more
difficult to avoid. They met in transit—in the kitchen, in the laundry
room—and Emerson kept the exchanges as brief as possible, before he could
imagine Rashid’s hands on Sarah’s body. Before Rashid could do or say something
nice, making it too hard for Emerson to stay angry.

I’m
in hell,
Emerson thought. At least the other times when Sarah had new boyfriends, he
could find a twisted comfort in loathing them. But it was impossible to hate
the guy.

What killed him was that
Emerson had all but forced the two of them together.
Talk to him
, he’d told Sarah.
Set him straight.
She’d set him straight, all right. He’d forgotten what
talk led to, with Sarah and her tender heart, unable to consciously inflict
pain. So many times when they were dating he’d look at her, certain she was
about to break it off with him, almost wishing she would just to have it over
with, and they’d end up making love instead, leaving him bewildered and
insecure about her intentions.

In charitable moments Emerson
felt obliged to warn Rashid, inexperienced with women and with Sarah, what he
was getting himself into.

This was not one of those
moments.

He had only gotten halfway up
the stairs when he caught a whiff of aftershave and saw the younger man quietly
closing Emerson’s bedroom door.

“Oh. There you are.” Rashid’s
brief smile seemed a bit forced. “I thought maybe you weren’t home.”

“You usually go into my room
when I’m not home?” Not true, of course, but he needed something to get pissed
off about.

“Never! I would never...I
only left you the rent, I didn’t want to leave it downstairs. There is...there
is something else I left you, too.” He flicked a second’s worth of frightened
brown eyes toward Emerson before averting his gaze. He didn’t look as smug
anymore. Emerson felt a charitable moment coming on. “It’s my notice. I will be
returning to India after all. The marriage is settled. You will be able to rent
my room beginning the end of April.”

“The marriage is—”
Emerson repeated dumbly. “You’re going through with it?”

“This is the decision which
has been made for me.”

Rashid ducked his head and
started down the stairs. The charitable moment passed. Emerson put a hand out
to stop him.

“What do you mean, the
decision has been made for you?”

Rashid swallowed. “It is just
as I have said.”

“Does Sarah know?”

“Please. I’m late for my
study group.” He pushed at Emerson’s arm.

Emerson tightened his grip on
the stair railing. “Does she even know you’re still getting married?”

Rashid’s voice was a squeak.
“Why are you doing this? I have done nothing to you!”

“No. It’s Sarah you’re going
to be doing it to.”

“But I would never dream of
hurting Sarah!”

“Yeah. Getting involved with
her then sneaking out of the country to marry another woman isn’t going to hurt
her at all.”

This appeared to give the man
pause. He glanced down at his shoes and then back up at Emerson, his expression
one of pleading. “It’s what I must do. What my family expects, and Sarah knows
this. Please. There will be students who are waiting for me, and I have the key
to the room.”

Emerson dropped his arm. Rashid
didn’t move. The two men looked at each other. “I’m very sorry if you are too
angry with me right now to be my friend,” Rashid said. “But Sarah is my friend.
It will never be my intention to hurt her.”

Emerson softened at his
housemate’s deference and from realizing he, too, had been acting like a
possessive jerk. “I’m sorry, Rashid. Look. It’s none of my business what you
have going with Sarah. But she was my friend first, and if you’re planning on
leaving, you ought to be decent about it.”

“Yes,” he said. “This I will
do.”

* * * * *

The following Friday, as the
newest Indian god of love showered, shaved, and put on too much cologne, Daisy called
Emerson and asked him to meet her at the coffee bar in the mall where she
worked. He dearly appreciated an excuse to get out of the house, even if it meant
going to a place dizzy with neon, gleaming tile, and polished brass samovars.
Daisy showed up late, in her work clothes: spiked heels and a dress that would
have looked at home atop a Slurpee machine. After ordering the most expensive
concoction on the menu, she told him it had been fun, especially the past
couple of weeks, but she was going back to her boyfriend.

Emerson sagged back into his
chair. He should have known. Nothing good had ever happened to him at a coffee
bar.

Slowly Daisy licked steamed
milk and cinnamon off the length of her stirrer with the tip of her tongue and
smiled. “But we can still be friends. Right?”

Emerson pulled out his wallet
and left his last two singles on the table. “No, thanks,” he said. “That’s not
what I’m looking for.”

During the drive home,
Emerson thought he should have been more depressed. A pretty girl—with
whom he’d been having more than decent sex—had dropped him for an
emotionally abusive, drunk-driving Neanderthal.

Actually, he was a little
relieved. She talked too much, and this thing she had going with Dirk was
getting too weird. One night she’d even called him Dirk at a really bad time,
but she’d been doing something interesting, and he hadn’t wanted to ruin the
moment.

He turned off Erie Boulevard
and headed toward his neighborhood. It was a beautiful night, the kind of night
he lived for all winter, when it was finally warm enough to smell the earth
again. Hazy moonlight glowed from behind still-bare trees. He had to be at the
infirmary in a few hours to fill in on an overnight shift, but it seemed a
waste to go home and miss this window of magic, this new season unfolding.

And Emerson felt like
celebrating. It was a small victory, an unusual one, and something only Sarah
would understand.

But if he went by the red
house with the black shutters, he knew he’d see Rashid’s car in the driveway,
so he continued on to the infirmary.
Might
as well clock in early
. He could use the extra spending money; he’d just
dropped the last of his cash on a double tall mocha latte.

As he swung through the doors
a few minutes later, the night nurse purred his name, his real name. “Honey,
I’m so glad you’re here. I’m on my last nerve.”

It felt good to be needed.
“What’s going on?”

“It’s Charlie.”

Emerson looked up from the
time clock. “He’s not—”

She shook her head. “Nah.
That old bastard’s gonna outlive us all. He’s just been fussing up a storm.
Must be that full moon. Ten o’clock, I’m trying to get everyone in bed, and he
wants to feed the ducks.”

After getting settled, Emerson
found Charlie in the sunroom, in hot debate with one of the young nurses’
aides. She was pretty but kind of uptight, the sort of girl who was looking for
a doctor, not an orderly.
Dallas
blared
from the television in the corner.

“I don’t care,” Charlie rasped,
flailing a bony arm. “I heard ’em, I wanna go see ’em.”

Emerson stepped in. “What’s
up, Charlie?”

The aide’s relief was
palpable.

The canyons in Charlie’s face
deepened as he smiled. He pressed his hands together and rubbed his palms. “Hot
spit, there’s my boy. Let’s go see them ducks.”

“But it’s bedtime, Mr. Fitzpatrick,”
the aide said. “You have to take your medication.”

“Why don’t you take it?” He covered
his mouth and said toward Emerson, “Maybe it’ll take that stick out of her
ass.”

“That’s not nice, Charlie,”
Emerson said, although it was probably true.

“Come on, wheel me out of
here,” Charlie said. “I’m tired of this goddamned henhouse.”

Chapter 40

As the invitation had been
hers, and because of Emerson’s warning about male culinary pursuit, Sarah refused
to let Rashid cook for her. Dinner was take-out Chinese, Indian beer, and
awkward stretches of silence. Neither of them brought up the marriage proposal,
although it sat in an empty chair, nibbled mu shu pork, and leered at them.
Sarah cautioned herself that these things took time.

After the last fortune cookie
had been unwrapped and the leftovers put away, Rashid announced that he had
brought a movie, knowing Sarah’s fondness for them. Then he retrieved from his
car a poorly reviewed romantic comedy whose ending Sarah could predict after
the first five minutes. A second beer, a third, and Sarah was rewriting the
script in her head. If she were watching this with Emerson, they’d be making
fun of the dialogue and the lame love scenes, the stupid things the characters were
made to do in the name of advancing a bad plot, and wondering aloud in which
universe the events could believably occur. But Rashid seemed engrossed, all
the way to the inevitable end. Sarah had even predicted the final line.

“I don’t mean to insult your
movie selection,” Sarah said, as the tape was rewinding. “But I can’t believe
these actors had the nerve to put their names on this film.”

“It was that bad?” Rashid
said, distractedly.

“Weren’t you watching?”

His eyes rounded with
innocence. “Yes. Yes I was.”

“No, you weren’t.”

The tape stopped with a
click.

He turned to face her.
“Perhaps not. Perhaps because there’s something I must tell you, and I was
thinking of how I should do it.”

Those were never good words
to hear, especially from someone who was in love with you and had been told he was
not supposed to be.

Sarah tossed down the last of
her beer.

“I’m going back to India at
the end of the semester after all.”

She blinked at him a moment
and lowered her gaze. “Because of me?”

He hesitated. She felt his
eyes on her. “It’s probably for the best.”

Sarah ached for him, that he thought
the only choice available to him was the safe one. What if love didn’t happen
like he’d been promised? What if he never got to be in love again?

“After...I do this, we will
not be able to be friends,” Rashid said. “We will not be able to be,” he made
vague hand gestures, “anything to each other.”

She let out a breath. “No, I don’t
think your wife would take kindly to you popping over on a jet to have dinner
with me every Friday night.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t
think so.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Will you?” he said,
brightly.

His unflagging enthusiasm for
her was hard to resist.

“Sure. You’re a nice guy, and
we’re friends. And you did ask me to marry you.” She smiled. “I’ll never forget
that.”

He averted his gaze. “But I’m
not so nice.”

Self-deprecation in men was
harder for Sarah to resist, especially after a few beers. She always wanted to
make them feel better. She put her palm up to his cheek, touching him like she
had in his car. This time, though, his skin was warm and his eyes sought hers,
looking for what she imagined to be salvation.

For the first time Sarah envied
the nameless, faceless Indian woman Rashid was going to marry. She ached because
Emerson didn’t want her, and she’d probably never get another nice guy again,
yet this woman would be handed one simply for being born into the right family.

“Yes, you are,” she said
softly. “You’re kind and sweet and you have a good heart, and you don’t know
how lucky your wife is to be getting you.”

“If my heart is so pure then
why would I ask you to be my friend only until I leave in order to get
married?” Rashid said. “That’s not right. It looks like...it looks like...”

“Like you’re looking to be
more than friends?”

He swallowed and said
nothing, but she knew by the fear in his eyes that it was true.

Don’t
be afraid,
she thought, smiling gently at him. She wanted to show him that there was
nothing to fear; she wanted to give him this gift to take back to India. That
way when he was sitting across a breakfast table from a woman he didn’t love,
he’d have something to remember.

He’d always remember her.

Her hand was still on his
cheek and she leaned over and kissed him lightly on the mouth. As she pulled
away, not wanting to scare him by going too quickly, he clutched her back to
him and plopped his lips on hers, a slobbery, beer-flavored kiss with too much
tongue and teeth. Unable to breathe, she eased him off. He gave her a wounded
look.

“Like this,” she said,
touching a finger to his mouth. “Relax. Think soft.”

“Soft,” he repeated.

It was the only word he would
get out for a long time.

* * * * *

Emerson’s main job
responsibility, in his opinion, was to see to the health and welfare of his
charges. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily according to the
rules, which sometimes got him into trouble.

 
“Some of these people are never going
home,” he’d told his supervisors. “If they’re not hurting the other patients,
why shouldn’t they be able to enjoy what little time they have left?”

Many times, to his surprise,
he won.

Charlie was one of those
patients. Which was why Emerson took him out to the duck pond at ten o’clock. A
wink to the night nurse, and she didn’t see a thing. She had the same
philosophy; she gave Emerson free rein as long as it didn’t make extra work for
her.

The night had cooled and
Emerson hoped Charlie was warm enough with the wool blankets he’d put around his
legs and shoulders. He peered over to make sure the blankets hadn’t slipped or
weren’t in danger of getting caught in his wheels, and there was Charlie,
pulling out a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter.

“Charlie...” Emerson began, and
then realized the folly of scolding him.

“I can quit any time I
wanna,” Charlie said, pausing as he set up one of his favorite jokes. “I just
don’t wanna.”

Emerson couldn’t resist. “You
know you only have one lung.”

Charlie thumped his skinny
chest with a fist. “Works pretty damned good, too.”

Emerson knew better. But try
telling an eighty-five-year-old cancer-riddled man in a wheelchair that you
want to deny him one of his last earthly pleasures.

He pushed Charlie to the
short concrete barricade at the perimeter of the pond, erected so patients
couldn’t accidentally toddle or wheel themselves in and drown in the shallow,
dirty water. One patient, a woman in the final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease,
had asked Emerson to take her out of her wheelchair, lower her in, and hold her
down. He hated to see patients suffer, but this Emerson had refused. Comfort,
he would give. An ear to complain into about family members who had turned
their backs, a shoulder to cry on about the indignities of their failing
bodies, rules bent and extra privileges granted, but he would take no part in
the end of someone’s life.

* * * * *

Sarah took Rashid into her
bedroom. She pulled off her sweater and jeans and climbed onto the bed in just
her bra and panties. He stared at her body. Still drunk on Kingfishers, his
desire for her, and all that soft, sloppy kissing, she leaned back against the
pillows.

He didn’t move. “You’re
allowed to be naked, too, you know.” She figured a gentle tease might break the
tension. It didn’t. So she unhooked her bra and tossed it at him. Flustered by
suddenly naked breasts, he fumbled for the garment as if it were a hot potato,
and it fell to the floor.

Rashid turned out the bedroom
light but left the one in the hall. He labored over undressing, careful with
the buttons on his shirt, and neatly set each item over the chair next to her
bed. He looked pudgier out of his clothes than in them. A small, fine whorl of
black hair spiraled on his chest like the top of a baby’s head. His undershorts
looked blindingly white against caramel skin. He slunk in beside her and she took
off his glasses. He looked so young and trusting without them, his unfocused
eyes searching for hers. His hands hovered over her as if he didn’t know where
he should, or would be allowed, to put them. She settled one on her hip and one
on her breast and hoped he’d get the hint. There was a lot of fumbling and more
sloppy kissing. He was slow to learn what she taught him but that could not be
blamed on lack of enthusiasm.

Then Sarah’s beer buzz began
to wear off, and the first sliver of regret cracked through. But it was too
late to back out. He’d think he’d done something wrong; he’d be too angry and
embarrassed to ever look at her or think about her again.

All Sarah could hope for was
that it wouldn’t last long, and from all the breathing and fumbling, it
probably wouldn’t.

Still in his shorts, he climbed
on top of her, his erection pressing into her thigh. “May I...” he breathed
against the side of her neck.

“Sure, hon.” She imagined
this was how old whores must feel. “Go ahead.”