The Heart Man
David reached across Cate's cheek and brushed a long strand of auburn
hair away from her mouth. "Were you ever diagnosed, as a kid, with having pica?"
"Pica? What are you talking about?"
"The eating disorder - a craving for rocks, chalk, ice
- "
"David, you're always looking for signs and symptoms."
He touched her lips. "-the hair in your mouth."
"You
used to think it was sexy, Doc."
"Pica can be symptomatic of anemia."
"Signs and symptoms. Diagnoses, shoosh.
It's the way my mouth
works, honey." She ran both hands through her shoulder-length hair
for
emphasis, framing her face in the vee formed by her upthrust bare arms, bent at the elbows. "My hair just goes there,always
has. Besides, I like it. You were always touching my face."
His dark sad eyes appraised his wife of
two years. He smiled and brushed the corner of her mouth with a knuckle. "There was always that one errant
strand caught between your lips." His fingers played
with an auburn ribbon of her hair. He knew that
at fifty-six her own slowing chemistry had banked the fire of her abundant copper-colored hair; but L'Oreal's bottled
chemistry had re-ignited its lame.
"It's what I remember most about you, our first date."
She smiled at the tall, thin, silver-haired man opposite her. "It was
windy out on the deck." She tilted her head at a flirty
angle, shook the thick, fiery mane. "I didn't
want to wear my hair pulled back, prissy. Y' know? Of course, now that I can't wear it that way, I want to. Go
figure."
David placed his cool elegant hands on either side of his wife's face and smiled. "Prissy is not a word I would
use to describe you. Not in that tight red shiny top you were wearing." His mother had been busty, had
had the same,
comforting old-European geography of valleys, mountains, plateaus - places to grab onto, nestle
in.
He and Catelyn had met at a fundraiser for the American Heart Association. To say she stood out in the crowd of publicly
beautiful people was like saying a bonfire made the camp cozy. As Chief of Cardiology at Stanford -
a heart man, she'd teased him that first evening - he worked the charity circuit the way the Chair was
expected
to. He lent his name, his fame, his single status to the round of dinners and fund-raisers that shook dollars
loose.
"Divorced, huh? Uh-oh, Doctor. Aren't cardiologists supposed to fix hearts?" It was Cate's first
year as Co-Chair of the Stanford Medical Center Valentine Dinner and Dance. At fifty-three, divorced
five years, she felt unmoored.
"Some hearts can't be fixed," he responded. "I notice you're
not wearing a ring. Too modern for marriage?" It annoyed him that someone her age should be so graceless. It figured.
Beauty and brains as a package? Sure. But with a heart, too? Not likely. Working for a mutual cause exposed their respective
weaknesses and strengths; both were up to the give and take of strategy and tactic,
goal and score. Oxygen.
Friction. Their egos ignited one another. They fed on one another with a fierce mutual need. Together they bested
Stanford's American Heart Association fund-raising record.
He invited her to look at the house he was having restored
near Woodside. She asked him for advice on biotech investments. They shared histories. They shared beds.
They decided to get on with life. They wed.
"It wasn't tight. That's how knits are supposed to look;
they cling." She smiled. "Besides, my mother told me that people warm up to red. Good for fund-raising."
Funny how sexual attraction often starts
out as an irritation, even anger, he thought.
"Red, schmed, it looked tight to me. Nice
female appurtenances, too."
A cough
stifled her laugh. "Among my many assets."
"I love your assets, even the fake ones."
He touched her lifelike hair, bright in the ambient glow from the cast-iron pellet stove. Instinctively,
he felt her pulse. He knew her heart would hold out a long time. God, how he wished the rest of her would too.
She
ignored his reference to her wig. "So, are we making a World War II movie here?" It was Valentine's Day.
"Where're my Hershey bars and nylons, sailor?" This week in Big Sur was David's gift to her, to both
of them. No fundraiser for other people's failing hearts. No chemotherapy, no blood draws, no CT's for Cate. Only
the portable oxygen tank, her tether to life, to remind them of the merciless march of Stage Four cancer, which had
deployed its poisoned emissaries to outflank first both ovaries and now both lungs.
David's colleague Nils Eriksson at Stanford
had been the one to identify Catelyn's ovarian cancer eighteen months ago, barely months after their marriage.
Their midlife honeymoon ended abruptly in a last-ditch medical march that dictated every step of their new intimacy,
that fed on their passion in a symbiotic diet of daring and despair. Although chemotherapy had resulted in the inevitable
hair loss and gaunt cheeks, the many tolls exacted on the road from life
to death, it had lent a fierce shine
to her deep-set blue-gray eyes.
David the doctor knew she would not last, but David the husband could not bring himself to believe it.
"The
wife of a patient once asked me if it's possible to die of a broken heart," he said. He exhaled slowly, wanting
her to give them both hope.
She touched his cheek. "Oh, David, that's tough. What was your answer?"
He looked
at his wife, tears damming up behind his anthracite gaze. After thirty years of peering into the chambers of the human heart,
diagnosing faulty valves, assessing the damage wrought by
heredity and habit, he had come to regard the multichambered
muscle as poets did. He granted it powers beyond his ability to heal, but not beyond his ability to hope.
David took her hand in his. "I told her to keep that love alive. I told
her to tell everyone how much they had meant to one another."
*****
New Orleans,
1974
Monet would have painted her
Mondrian, intersected:
still shutters, jalousie’d doors
chiaroscurro’d alleys, furtive
when the rain pours.
She’s French,
right down to her gutters,
New Orleans, mighty Mississippi whore.
Tawdry, sulky,
primped in primer’d paint,
she opens her thighs to the river’s thrust,
awash
in the traffic of men.
Next Step
Graham Cosgrove felt the near-midday heat trapped under the shed-roofed garage
attached to his condo at Clipper Cove. He turned off the ignition. Every degree Fahrenheit multiplied exponentially
as he sat in his car. It was too hot. He should get out, but it seemed too great an effort.
“It’s not working out, Graham. You know that,” Rebecca had said.
He reached up to the garage door opener clipped to the right-hand sun visor and
pressed its button. Overhead the opener’s chain drive screeched in protest, begging for a shot of WD-40.
“What’s not working out?” he’d asked in reply. Standing
above her like that, he knew he was intimidating. He’d meant to be.
“You, in this agency, “ she answered in measured tones. “Sit down,
Graham.”
Oh,
he’d sat. Not in one of the chrome-and-leather Van der Rohe chairs opposite her desk. He decided they were too lightweight
for someone of his bulk. So he moved to the back wall, where a leather sofa promised him a softer landing.
“Look, Graham.” The prematurely silver-haired president of RSVP, Rebecca
Sterling: Vantage Personnel, tapped the accordion-pleated file folder on the desk before her, avoiding his gaze. Her
cell phone rang. Ignoring the man facing her, she reached to the desk-top charger and answered it. She would have
ignored the office line.
Graham knew she was sweating this moment.
Everyone sweats this moment. Am I the sweat-er or the sweat-ee, he chuckled to himself. The bitch is going to pay dearly for
this. Oh, she was smart, but she’d never been in a battle zone, under live fire. He had.
“Care for a drink?” he asked. She frowned and shook her head, not
looking up, shushing him. He rose from the fawn-colored suede sofa and walked over to the front-lit etched glass wall behind
which hid presentation boards, a video screen, and a bar. “I’m pouring myself a drink, ” he smiled.
She continued to look at the folder in front of her. “I think the occasion bloody well calls for it,” he announced.
He wondered if the center of her attention was the resume of his replacement. It would be her style to cold-cock him.
Rebecca looked up, her eyes focused on the middle distance. She was listening
to something she wanted to hear, evidently, for she was looking at Graham with that smarmy, even, steady, “I-told-you-so”
smile that women who come up the hard way, with aces, like to throw on the table.
Articulated metal-and-fiberglass panels of the garage door shut out some of the heat and all
the glare of the October day.
Cosgrove
looked up through the sunroof of his thirteen-year-old Jaguar sedan and grunted. Next step? Next step?
Take the cardboard office files out of his trunk now, while he had good hours
before him? Or pour himself another shot of lubricant, something to ease the sticky parts of his life? Hell, it was almost
noon. Time for lunch. Time for another drink.
Graham Cosgrove looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. Fifty-seven isn’t old. Fifty-seven had experience
behind it, something to show for showing up all those years. Hell, fifty-seven had plenty left. He stuffed his cell phone
into its black kidskin leather pouch, slipped that into the larger case that held the Palm Pilot, all tucked executively into
the pricey confines of what his friend and sometime-companion Eleanor called his “VIP Purse”. He passed through
the single-car garage that buffered his Mill Valley condo from the glances of his neighbors.
Wrong day to wear the raw
silk shirt, that was shit for sure. OK, so part of the sweat was physical – he knew he needed to lose 115 pounds –
but part of it was emotional as well. He caught the familiar rank edge of fear, remembered the smell produced by the prospect
of a Walther PK shoved under his chin. Funny how smells shove the past into the present.
OK, the internist had warned him. No more steak, not even the stuff on sweet grass and clean
water. No more pork, damn the “other white meat” campaign. No more paté, no more duck or goose. No,
no, no, no. No more cigars. No more wine, no beer. No booze, period.
Fuck ass, no booze. He padded over to the built-in wet bar, reached for the bottle of the
stuff he reserved for himself and poured three fingers of Laphroig, the fifteen-year-old stuff, and slid open the patio door.
Nothing prettier than real old, real Scottish scotch clinging in pale amber ribbons inside a Tiffany hand-cut crystal old-fashioned.
His ex-wife Livy had bought those glasses, three dozen, in Limerick, Ireland, when they heard he’d won the Pulitzer.
That was ’81.
Graham looked at his image reflected in the mirrored wall facing the entry. Now his raw silk shirt wore huge half-moons of
sweat under his ample arms. He undid the waistband of his pleated silk shorts, which took the pressure off his crotch, stepped
onto the deck. He could see the channel from here, but Just Cos was anchored elsewhere, her draft too deep and her thirty-eight
feet too long for the slip, free with condo rentals, just out his back door. Low tide in this lagoon couldn’t
accommodate an offshore boat. Instead, he kept her dinghy close to hand, a quick motor out to the Taiwan-commissioned Tayana
sloop.
Graham collapsed into the iron deck chair
and perched his feet atop the stainless-steel railing that bordered his end unit. He’d let the scotch work, then he’d
work on a solution. Then he’d work on the part of the sweat that had leaked fear, anger, betrayal. Nine fucking
years as vice president, nine fucking years of kissing that broad’s ass, shmoozing witless clients, hustling business
at every event, buying into every seminar where he could steal clients, sucking up to airhead young tyros with full pockets
and empty brains. And one fucking year short of a big piece of that broad’s ass, a piece of a business he’d damned
well helped build. He gulped an ounce of scotch all at once.
Fuck ‘em all. She forgot he’d been senior field reporter for, then chief of, Time’s Paris bureau
twenty years before he started missing too many cues and clues, when his nightmares began hugging the shadows like assassins
in gum shoes. He knew more about Mediterranean murders, Turkish bath takeouts and Iranian ice-houses than the taxpayer-funded
Intelligence Agency.
They forgot he knew more about how the world’s
commercial wheels got greased and who held the gun than any ten of these thirty-something yahoos with the beachboy hair colors
and earrings. Why risk his neck? Citizen Sixpack wanted to watch soft porn, not read hard news.
So Graham retired from journalism with the minimum pension and a maxium grudge.
He went home, packed up what was left after his wife went for the divorce and the house, and his ignorant kid went off to
UC Santa Cruz to major in babes and beach sand. OK, so Graham too opted out to California, went into sales, bought the
Just ‘Cos and put up the storm jib. Next step.
She had called him a loser, Rebecca. That
bitch. After landing the Bechtel recruiting contract for her. He cut off the tip of his last Partagas, lit it up. No way that
fucking broad got her X on that dotted line. Y? Graham chuckled at the pun he’d made. Y, he thought, was what
having fifty-seven years and the Y chromosome under your belt gets this world. He added three more fingers to the empty glass.
On the patio
table the red cordless phone rang. He picked it up and exhaled.
After a minute or so, an office assistant on the other end handed him over to
his internist in Greenbrae. In the low tide in the lagoon below him, a quickening of light and shadow hinted at a chase. Thousands
of tiny silver shiners seemed to be baiting something faster, bigger. Just as soon, they were back out in the marina channel.
He stood watching them, listening to the details of lab reports. He trusted his oncologist’s judgment. They golfed in
a foursome every now and then. He was a good man, Steinberg. Talked about next steps.
Graham pulled on the Cuban
cigar, input the appointment with Steinberg in his Palm Pilot. His plate seemed suddenly full of next steps. If you’ve
got your health you’ve got everything, right? What if you don’t? What if you get a rash of shit?
Graham Cosgrove
snuffed the cigar, went inside. He punched up his messages. It must be a record, only nine and almost noon. Fired on a Monday.
Fucked on a Monday. He stripped, dropped his damp clothing in a heap at the foot of the bed.
Next step.
His
left jaw ached below the ear. He massaged it as he wandered out to the front room. A quick glance told him neighbors weren’t
around and he didn’t give a shit anyway. He walked out to the patio table and picked up the half-smoked cigar.
Next step, next step. He relit the cigar and wondered if the pretty redhead in 5206 was home.
Downstairs, next to the boat ramp, his retired, alcoholic landlord glanced up.
His three-hundred-pound tenant was standing naked in the breezeway on the second floor. “Say Graham, how’s your
supply of Laphroig?” he grinned.
Graham
turned his back, went inside, slammed the glass-door. Fuckin’ A, Graham muttered, pulling the vertical blinds.
Next step ain’t there.
