Honeydew: Stories Part 2

Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded-up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He stretched the affected area between his forefinger and middle finger, and made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came out too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.

"It hurts a lot but not as much as before," Acelle said. "I'm sorry I snapped at you."

Near the main entrance-the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm-was the gift shop that had recently become Victoria Tarnapol's to manage. Victoria had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades earlier. Returning now, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.

The gift shop was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a gla.s.s candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, as were the games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria's ascendancy, two round cafe tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and slices of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-cafe became popular-many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you'd prefer not to know existed.

Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the gla.s.s-walled gift shop. In those first days he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter-she had a face like a G.o.ddess, she had a spinal deformity-had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one, who usually helped out, was late for school, and so he had to make all three bologna sandwiches: his, Camilla's, Acelle's. On his midmorning break, when he would normally be walking in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria instead. But he stopped to look at a s.h.i.+p in a bottle in the gift-shop window-he'd like to try making one of those things-and then, looking up, looking farther in, he saw the cafe tables, one of them occupied by a man slumped with worry, and behind him, in a little recess, the manager. Her gray hair was cut close to her narrow head. The slide of her nose was interrupted by a b.u.mp, adding beauty to a face which was already distinguished. She was slicing something and the sight of that something pulled him right in. It was linzer torte. It turned out to taste better even than Marie's, G.o.d rest her soul.

Thereafter he came in every morning at 10:15. He ate various breads, various coffee cakes, various pies; also citron gteau and baklava and a puff inside which seemed to float not chocolate but its divine essence. He liked them all but he preferred the less sweet pastries. She began to make more of those, fewer of the sugary ones.

Since the gift shop was rarely busy before eleven, they were able lightly to pa.s.s the time of day. One morning-the treat was gingerbread with pieces of ginger in it-he asked her to join him at his table. After a moment of confusion, during which her palms reached for her sculpted hair, she washed her hands again and cut a slice for herself and sat down opposite him.

Without discussion Joe and Acelle went to the Castle, using the old entrance, the one Zeph favored. In the emergency room Acelle gave her name and the family's insurance number. She knew it by heart because of her sister's frequent visits. The doctor thought Joe was Acelle's brother and allowed him to remain in the cubicle, but when he examined Acelle he pulled the curtain.

"I'm going to give you a shot of Novocain and then wash this out for you. Have your mother change the dressing every day and put on this ointment, and don't take a bath tonight. I'll give you a teta.n.u.s shot for good measure." After doing exactly what he said he'd do, he rolled her onto her back and lifted her easily-she was a small girl-and stood her up. "Dizzy?" he asked. His hand on her shoulder steadied her for a couple of necessary minutes. "Sitting will be painful for a few days." He flicked open the curtain to reveal Joe, waiting on a stool, and on his lap a plastic bag holding Acelle's b.l.o.o.d.y underpants. "Did you make that incision, dude?"

"Yes," Joe said.

"Good job."

"Good job," Acelle echoed as they left, and she attempted to take his hand, and after a few moments he allowed it to be taken.

And now Zeph prepared to visit patients scheduled for surgery tomorrow. He put on fresh scrubs because people like to see their doctors in costume.

The first was an old childless widow with cancer of the tongue. It was advanced-she had ignored it, had skipped appointments with dentist and doctor, had worn a kerchief whatever the weather, had invented excuses not to visit her few friends still living, all incapacitated anyway. But yesterday, fate in the form of a fissure in the sidewalk had tripped her. The ambulance attendants, placing her swelling hand on her thigh, gently removed the telltale babushka. The lesion bulged like an apricot. The emergency-room doc splinted her broken fingers and she was whisked to Head and Neck, and examined, and talked to, and scheduled for surgery.

Of course the mutilated tongue slurred her speech. But Zeph understood it all, giving her the occasional gift of a direct gaze.

"I taut...go way," she fabricated.

He knew she had not thought it would go away; she had thought instead that discovery would mean instant yanking out of the organ and death shortly afterward, whereas secrecy would mean prolonged if solitary life.

She wanted to know-she had resorted to a pad of paper now, managing the pencil with her less damaged hand-how much of her tongue they would leave. Her surgeon wouldn't say.

"She can't say, Mrs. Flaherty. Neither can I. But I can tell you that there are many ways therapists can restore some patients' speech." She had to be content with that, and also with his now averted gaze, though he did press her hand.

"U eye oy" were her parting syllables.

He didn't feel like a nice boy. In two days, when he made his post-op visit, she wouldn't be able to manage even those vowels, and if therapy could help this half-tongued woman it would be a miracle. But he hadn't lied.

He looked at the next patient's chart. An unsingular history. White female; thirty-six years old; unmarried; healthy; one pregnancy, terminated. No immediate family. Complaint: back pain lasting several months, recent inability to walk without severe pain. X-rays and an MRI of the vertebrae showed a ma.s.s obscuring L4 and L5 but revealed nothing more about this secret. A needle biopsy had told more. Stage 4.

Her name was Catherine Adrian. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes. Shallow vertical grooves, one on each cheek, enclosed her sculpted mouth in loving parentheses. Her jaw was long and slender. He could make these observations freely because she was asleep and he could comfortably look at her face.

He glanced at his clipboard. He had three more patients to visit, to rea.s.sure about tomorrow, to convince that they were in good hands, or at least that their pain from the knife would be managed to their satisfaction. He'd come back to Ms. Adrian later.

As if on cue, she opened her eyes. They were blue, almost as dark as the ones he avoided in his mirror.

"h.e.l.lo, Ms. Adrian. I'm Zephyr Finn, your anesthesiologist."

"How nice."

In Ms. Adrian's room there was both a chair and a stool. Zeph chose to sit on the side of her bed. "Are you worried about tomorrow?" he asked.

"Say that I'm curious."

"About...?"

"I want to see what it looks like, this alien that's wrapped itself around my spine. I'd like to watch on a screen while they disappear it."

"Some back operations are done with regional anesthetic," he said as if reading from a script. "Patients on the table can watch a monitor. Most close their eyes. But we don't know the depth of your growth and we can't risk touching an organ while you're awake."

"Can you preserve the thing in alcohol?"

"I can ask the surgeon."

She sighed. "Whatever they find, there will be an end to my pain."

She would soon be paralyzed, he guessed. "Yes," he said with a.s.surance.

And then-as if she were under his care already, as if he had administered a nerve block and a sedative and was keeping her lightly awake-he talked. The volumes by the side of the bed were children's books-The House at Pooh Corner, the novels of Peter d.i.c.kinson, the Grimms. "I read those too," he said. "My only genre. That small amount of magic."

"Chaste pleasures."

"Endings never final..."

She taught mathematics at a local junior college, not a very good one. "I do mainly remediation, I try to make things interesting; some of them fall asleep anyway. I'm a soporific-perhaps I'm really in your game."

Game took them to chess and Scrabble and the Red Sox-he avoided mentioning partic.i.p.atory sports; she probably had played tennis, poor thing. An hour went by. More time would have pa.s.sed had the surgeon not entered the room to find his best anesthesiologist sitting on a patient's bed.

Robotic again, Zeph got to his feet. "Good afternoon, Dr. Schapiro."

Dr. Schapiro nodded and took Ms. Adrian's hand in his. "How are you feeling today?" he began.

Zeph walked toward the door, turned, flashed his eyes at hers. She flashed back.

The ma.s.s, as she was about to learn, had w.a.n.gled its way inward from its claw hold on L4. A frozen section done in the OR confirmed that the tumor was a ferocious beast; it had already eaten bone; bits of it must be all over the place.

Hector Bahande and Victoria Tarnapol gradually exchanged life stories. Hector spoke of his hopes when he'd come to this country and of the things that had bedeviled him one after another-his child's affliction, his wife's death, rest her soul, the necessity of finding a job near home. Victoria told him that she had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat. Maybe if you cooked better...

"She won't last forever," Victoria's sisters had falsely a.s.sured her. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask G.o.d to rest her soul. "How does your older daughter occupy her time?" she said to Hector.

His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. "She carves," he said, his homely face continuing to beam. "She carves animals and small human figures."

Oh Lord, sweet little lambs, darling odalisques. She was sorry she'd asked.

"Shall I show you?" His hand was already in his pocket. "Most are bigger; this is a mini."

It was the figure of a dog-a puppy, really-peeking in solemn distress, with no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the b.u.t.tons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.

"Are there more of these?" she asked sharply.

"Many, many, but bigger."

"Does she sell them?"

He shrugged. "There's a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money."

A pimp, she thought..."Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage."

He carefully wiped his mouth. "Miss Tarnapol-"

"Victoria."

"Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with sh.e.l.ls."

"Yes, of course...but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought-after window dresser for a time. Hector...may I come and see the others?"

"I will bring you two tomorrow."

He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll's carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief, pressing themselves to her stomach, suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.

"Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he actually gets for these. Let me try to sell them, and I will retain the ten percent and give the rest to you. I'll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift-shop window as advertis.e.m.e.nt. 'Not for Sale,' the card will read...intriguing."

"n.o.body will be intrigued by a woman about to die in childbirth."

"We'll see."

She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of G.o.dolphin, just over the Boston line. Then she persuaded the owner of a flouris.h.i.+ng dress shop in fas.h.i.+onable downtown to display the next piece Hector brought her, a mynah bird with a stocking cap, each st.i.tch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own commission with the dress-shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla's pieces always occupied a place of honor there. Some people began to come in not for the clothing, primarily, but to see what was on display, though everyone usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.

As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe's house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless activity: reading Zeph's anatomy book in Zeph's monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.

Anatomy wasn't altogether strange to them. In s.e.x education, they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up toward his partner, the ovum; and they knew there were times he would fail to reach her-because of her monthly, maybe, or fate, maybe. "But fate may be against you," the teacher warned. In the anatomy book they had seen artists' renditions of various tumors, some like sacks of vermicelli, some like furry fungi. And when a popular football player injured his knee, the television anchor informed them-separately, for each was at home, though they conferred about it later-that the knee was one of the most complicated joints in the body. Certainly it seemed loaded with ligaments, menisci, tendons, and cartilage. The whole apparatus looked untrustworthy, Acelle told Joe.

"Interdependent," he corrected.

Her father's knee gave him a s.h.i.+tload of trouble. She'd wanted to borrow the book for a night and bring it home to Camilla, who could have looked at the various two-dimensional drawings and carved a knee in her own peculiar style. But Joe would never permit the book to leave the room. So one day Acelle herself tried to draw versions of the joint. Joe was muttering the names of the facial nerves, probably memorizing them. Zeph's book was open on the bed, and they were kneeling before it. Joe kept repeating his sequence, and she kept drawing. Then he turned toward her. "Lacrimal, lingual, mandibular. Aren't you through yet? Ophthalmic."

"Yes," she said. She would come back to the knee.

They turned a few pages, and found the circulatory system.

And there it was, just what she'd been waiting for: a lumpy device with chambers and ventricles and arteries and atriums-atria-looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else's ventricle, from one heart to another, that's how it was, it happened in every story she'd read. It happened in palaces and cities and farms and in the neighborhoods. You could be a princess lying in a Castle bed, you could be stuck in a wheelchair, you could be a security guard, you could be a woman with hair like a boy's. The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy, like Zeph, like Joe...

"It's getting dark," Joe said.

"I'd better go home."

"Tiptoe," he warned.

Catherine would receive her useless chemical infusions as an inpatient-fetching her with an ambulance every day, meanwhile trying to slow the failure of the other organs, was too impractical even for the nitpicking insurance company.

"So I'll die here," she said, "of one thing or another."

It was their five o'clock visit-the only one of the day. This was her most alert half hour. By the end of the first week they knew everything about each other-her long deteriorating love affair; his compliant mother, who followed Old Walking Stick from commune to commune, Zeph in tow, until she died of exhaustion; his difficulty talking to anyone who wasn't on the table; her disappointment with the trajectory of her life. He described special places in the Castle. There was a memorial tomb containing a Civil War soldier in the bas.e.m.e.nt, so big you could sleep on it yourself-he sometimes had done so. The residents' crash room, where anyone with a free quarter of an hour could lie undisturbed on the bed. ("I kept Treasure Island under the pillow," he confided.) The hospital chapel, so plain and undenominational that, when empty of sobbing people, it seemed like the waiting area of a railroad station at two in the morning.

He always brought pastry from Victoria, who saved it for him. Catherine managed a bite; after a while Zeph ate the rest. One afternoon, after leaving Catherine, he went into the gift shop and bought the suffering doll. "Preeclampsia," he diagnosed. Victoria quietly took down the Not for Sale sign and wrapped the thing. Zeph put it on a shelf in his room.

The time came when Catherine's organs insisted on failing-kidneys, liver. "Without the chemo I might feel less sick," she said.

"You might."

"I think I'll order it stopped."

He didn't reply.

"What would you do if you were me?"

"If I were you? If I were you I'd marry me."

IV poles were their best men. Zeph had invited Joe and Joe had invited Acelle. The justice of the peace ignored the ages of these witnesses-they could write their names, couldn't they. Through the three narrow archers' windows a pale sun illuminated Catherine's pale face. The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had bought rings for both of them. His "I do" was firm, surprising everyone but Catherine. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.

He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword from its sheath and swished at the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.

From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.

She died a week later of renal failure-more or less peacefully, as such things go.

Camilla didn't become the rage, but she acquired a small reputation in the city, and she banished the crook who called himself a dealer. Victoria persuaded her to entrust her work to a small respectable agency with a good publicist. Camilla agreed, on the condition that her own photograph never appear and her disability not be mentioned. Pride, Victoria expected, could be overcome as time went on. Money came in. The Bahande flat was gradually improved until it looked like a home.

"But what about your ten percent?" Hector argued one day after dinner.

He and Victoria were now sitting on the porch, Hector's painful knee elevated on a wicker stool. Victoria had cooked the meal for everyone in the Bahande kitchen-fish, a salad, fruit, walnut bread. Joe had spent the rest of the evening reading Richard Dawkins; Acelle, working on her knitting: a scarf for someone. Zeph watched Camilla carve a cat's head for his walking stick; one feline eye had a congenital droop. Only Camilla knew that Zeph was planning to give the stick to her father. When Joe said he was going home, Zeph had interrupted his silent concentration to keep the boy company on the walk. The girls had gone to bed.

"Your ten percent," Hector said again.

"I'm aging, not an agent. I'm glad someone else is doing that hard work. I'm suited to a gift shop."

"You have been a gift to us," he said softly.

How handsome he looked in his new s.h.i.+rt-though no more handsome than in the security officer's uniform he put on every day.

"As for old-you are not much older than me," he said, leaning forward but not yet touching her.

"I'm sixty."

He nodded without surprise. "I'm forty-five, and my bad joints make me fifty. Come live with us."