Strong Motion (71 page)

Louis said, “I can’t help you here, Mrs. Seitchek.”

He left her in the hall and went into Room 833. Renée said, “You know why she wants me back there with her?”

“She wants to take care of you.”

“Yeah, she does,” she admitted. “But what she really hopes is that if I stay there I’ll develop a taste for golf. And kelly-green skirts. And meet one of the young doctors she can’t stop talking about, and marry him.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t know her.”

He waited a moment. “You’re not really going to get a nurse, are you?”

“Watch me.”

“But I can do it myself.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Please let me.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You have to let me.”

She closed her eyes. “I know I have to let you.”

More than anything else, he was jealous of her infirmity. It was like a baby that was partly his but dwelt inside her body alone. Listening to it and learning its secrets absorbed most of her attention every day. Whenever he thought he understood it—when he thought that it no longer hurt her to laugh, or that she still needed him to reach things from the table for her—she would turn around and correct him. He had guesses; she had certainty. He supposed that maybe she did still love him, but even if she did she had no time for him. Her distance, the feebleness of her feelings towards him, reminded him of the dreams he had where she was cold to him: where love wasn’t there, where there was another man she wasn’t telling him about.

But the baby was his, too. The pain in her body, the pain from her bullet-torn back muscles and pierced diaphragm and splintered rib and femur and the surgical incisions, had a way of spreading into his own body and making it difficult for him to breathe. He remembered when she was mobile and unbreakable, when he could lie on top of her on a hard floor and she could laugh, when they could drink Rolling Rock and listen to the Stones, when they could be mean to each other and it didn’t matter, when he could hate the world and it didn’t matter. What hurt him was his feeling of responsibility. He wished he were still working for WSNE, still driving on Route 2 in the blue vernal morning twilight, still in his car with Renée before he kissed her. He wished he’d let her hand her Sweeting-Aldren files over to Larry Axelrod and the EPA. He wished he could have paid attention to all nine innings of the Red Sox game they’d seen from Henry Rudman’s seats, could remember who had won and how, could have knowledge as clean and permanent and inconsequential as a box score. He didn’t understand how he could have let a small part of his life—his greed? his hurt? his outrage?—make him responsible for the pain and desolation that had descended on himself and her and much of Boston. But he was responsible, and he knew it.

♦

A Town Car with a
PROLIFE 7
vanity plate was parked outside the house when he got back to Pleasant Avenue. He went inside and mounted the stairs slowly, still a little light-headed with Red Cross sickness.

Philip Stites was standing in the middle of Renée’s room, beside the chair he’d rolled over from the desk and had obviously been sitting in. Renée sat in her armchair in a thick sweater and sweatpants and the glasses which she needed all the time now. This morning she’d weighed in at 98 pounds, up one pound from the previous Friday but still down seven from her weight in June. The feverish rigidity of her face muted her expressions. All that registered when she looked at Louis was the flash of sunlight on her lenses. He hurried into the other big room, the room he slept in, and set the books he’d bought on the floor.

“Louis,” Renée said.

He returned to the hallway. “Yo.”

“Philip was just leaving.”

“Oh. So long.”

Stites, wearing an inscrutable smile, waved his hand. Renée was looking at Louis intently. “I didn’t realize the two of you had met,” she said.

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“Those were unhappy circumstances,” Stites said. “These are much happier ones.”

Renée kept her disapproving eyes on Louis even as Stites took her hand and wished her well. Louis opened the door for the minister. “So, Philip,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’m sure it meant a lot to her.”

Stites started down the stairs, motioned casually to Louis to follow, as if he had no doubt that Louis would, and stopped on the doggy second-floor landing. Louis glanced at Renée, whose expression hadn’t changed, and descended the stairs.

“Why do I get this impression of hostility?” Stites asked a beam of bright dust specks.

“I hear you’re leaving town,” Louis said.

“Tomorrow morning. Ever been to Omaha, Nebraska? About the only thing it’s got in common with Boston is a big sky.”

“You feel you’ve done sufficient damage here.”

Stites failed to react to this stimulus. He unwrapped a stick of sugarless gum and daintily pushed it into his mouth. “Hostility, hostility,” he said. “I came to apologize to Renée for any pain I ever caused her. And I tell you what, Louis, it made me pretty happy to hear what you been doing for her.”

“I’m glad I made you happy, Philip.”

“Fine, say what you gotta say. You’ll never see me again. But you know damn well that what you’re doin’ is a very good thing.”

“Right,” Louis said. “I’m a hell of a guy. See my Band-Aid? I’ve been giving blood. My penance, right? Because I sinned, right?” He stared at Stites, quivering. “I laughed at Jesus and I wasn’t faithful to my girlfriend and I let her kill our baby, but now I’ve got it all straight in my mind. I’m taking care of her and trying to live a Christian life. We’ll get married and have children and we’ll all be singing hymns on TV. Except I’m
such
a good Christian that if anybody tries to say I’m doing the right thing I deny it because if I didn’t, that would be pride, and pride’s a sin, right? And faith is a thing inside you. So I’m not only a hell of guy, I’m deep and true, right?”

Stites chewed his gum with smooth, slow jawstrokes. “Nothing you say makes me stop loving God.”

“Well, go ahead. Go ahead.”

“I hope you find some happiness.”

“Yeah, you too. Have fun in Omaha.”

Stites looked at Louis with the complicity and pleasure of a person being told a joke. He laughed, exposing his little wad of gum. It wasn’t a forced or cruel laugh but the laugh of someone who had expected to be delighted, and was. He gave Louis a last, knowing look and trotted down the stairs. Through the landing’s filthy window, Louis watched him evade the grasping honeysuckle and get into his car. He felt a large but strangely painless emptiness inside him, as when he’d been bluffed in a poker game.

Upstairs again, he assumed a casual manner. “Can I make you some lunch?”

Renée sat in her armchair and looked at him. The chair occupied a shadow between patches of sunshine on the floorboards. Her silence was ominous in the extreme.

“Can I make you some lunch?” he said again.

“You certainly got me back pretty easily, didn’t you?”

He weighed the consequences of ignoring that she’d said this. He leaned on the doorframe. “What do you mean?”

“I mean one day I’m living by myself and hating you for how much you hurt me, and the next thing I know I wake up and you’re living with me again and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“You woke up a long time ago.”

“No, I didn’t wake up a long time ago. You listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying I just woke up.”

“Fine. You just woke up.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“About . . . ?”

“About the fact that you’re living with me and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“Well, I was about to make you some lunch.”

“I’m saying you got me back pretty easily.”

“What was I supposed to do? Keep away from you? While you were in the hospital? I mean, how many times did I tell you I was sorry? And you said to stop saying it—”

“Well I felt like shit.”

“But so all I can do is show you how sorry I am and how much I love you.”

She flinched as though the word love were a dart. “I’m saying I never had a chance to think about what I wanted. Everything just happened. And I’m not at all sure about it.”

“You’re not sure you want me living here.”

“That’s part of it.”

“You’re not sure you even want to see me.”

“That’s the other part of it. I mean, I do want to see you. But everything’s all tied together, there’s no room to
think
. I want to get to know you, somehow. I don’t want us to be together just because we happen to be together. I want to start over again.”

“Beginning with me moving out.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You want me to leave. You’re trying to say it in a nice way.” She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She wasn’t someone he knew, this underweight woman with the hectic face and overgrown hair and wire-frame glasses. A deft exchange had been effected, and no fraud was involved—the woman was clearly who she seemed to be. She just wasn’t the ghost made of memories and expectations that he had seen at breakfast. She opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. “Yes, I want you to leave.”

He took an unopened envelope from the table in the hallway and carried it into her room. “Is this the problem?”

She didn’t even glance at it. “Give me some credit.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yeah, all right. It’s part of the problem. It upsets me that you got a letter from her here. It upsets me that I found out about it because you were out and somebody else brought the mail up. Because for all I know, you get letters like this every day—”

“I do not.”

“And I just don’t know about it. That’s part of the problem. But it’s not—”

“You think she sends me letters and I don’t tell you. You think I’ve got a whole second relationship—”

“Shut up. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s totally inappropriate for her to send you letters here, and it’s up to you to make that clear to her, because she obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with it herself.”

The personal pronouns—
she, her
—were pronounced with a hatred like nothing he had heard from her before. Lauren didn’t hate Renée like this.

“I’ll let her know,” he said.

She shook her head. “I can’t live with you.”

“I told you I don’t even think about her anymore. I told you all I want’s a chance to make it up to you. I know I acted like a prick. But I didn’t even sleep with her and I never think about her now.”

“And boy was that stupid of you. Because it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you slept with her. It makes zero difference.”

“Well I would have done it, but she didn’t want to.”

Renée looked at the ceiling in disgust and disbelief. “That’s sick. That is so sick. She walks into your apartment but she won’t sleep with you. Because what, I can just imagine it. Because she’s a better person than I am, because she really loves you and she won’t fuck you before she marries you. That really makes me feel good, to hear that.”

“I felt sorry for her,” Louis said, very quietly. He set the letter from Lauren on the desk.

“Well, here’s somebody else to feel sorry for. I do the best I can with self-pity but I can’t do it all. Here’s a person who has a fever every day and whose back still hurts and whose chest is all scars and who can’t see right anymore and has to live and be ugly and know she’s ugly every minute of the day, if you need somebody to feel sorry for.”

He frowned. “I’ve never felt sorry for you. I hurt with you, but I admire you and love you. And you’re so beautiful.”

She made no attempt to hold her tears back. “I can’t live with you. I can’t live with you, and I can’t get rid of you.”

“It’s easy to get rid of me.”

“Well, then, just do it. Just go. Because this is the real me you’re looking at. This is what I’m like inside. I’m a jealous insecure little ugly shrew. And that’s what I’m going to be, and you can go on living with me because you feel guilty and you can watch me make your life a hell, or you can get out and go live with her right now because I certainly have no desire to live with you if we’re going to fight like this, or else you can be kind to me—”

“Kind to you?”

“Kinder than you’ve already been. Kind to me right this minute. You can tell me you don’t think about her all the time. You can tell me I may not be as young as she is, and I may be a scarred-up ugly mess, but I’m still not
so
bad. You have to tell me that
all the time
. You have to tell me you don’t write letters to her and you don’t call her and you appreciate me. You have to take all the things you’ve said and say them about a hundred times more often. Because I’m trying to have energy, I’m trying to get back to being a
person
again, but I can’t do it fast enough.”

For a moment Louis watched her shiver and weep in her armchair. Then he bent over and put his hands in her armpits and raised her to her feet. She was very light. The lenses of her glasses each had a single tear streak down the middle. He kissed her unresponding lips with none of the discretion and conscious kindness of their bedtime and hello and goodbye kisses. He kissed her because he was starving for her.

“Don’t.”

“Why not.”

“You’re just doing it because you—ow. Ow!”

He was squeezing her hard, one of his hands directly on the closed entrance wound in her back, his other hand on her butt beneath her sweatpants and underpants, his thigh squarely in her groin. She took his ear in her mouth and said, “Don’t squeeze.”

She shook while he undressed her on the bed. She covered herself with a blanket while he stood up to take his own clothes off.

“Don’t ever put that sweatshirt on again,” she said.

He knelt beside her and peeled back the blanket. He put his cheek on her white belly and the heel of his hand in the hollow of her pelvis. He wanted to fill this hollow with semen. The fast-dwindling warmth of it would tickle her, make her belly convulse like a hillside in the throes of a disaster. He knew this because he’d seen it happen, back in May.

She sat up and tried to pull him onto her.