"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.
