Days Between Stations Read online

  He lay in bed another hour.

  When he rose, he pulled on his pants, opened his door, climbed the stairs and didn’t knock. He merely turned the doorknob and stepped in. He closed the door behind him. He checked the patch and instinctively changed eyes, only to change it back—something he rarely did. He undid his clothes and dropped them to the floor. Lauren, he called.

  She heard his voice somewhere just below her womb. She couldn’t see anything but a fleshy gray, and she struggled to bring to mind a face to go with the voice. The voice was far away, of course. It was faint, tiny and drifted up to her in petals, like it was peeling off the walls of the tubes below her stomach. Her tubes and passages were lined with this voice, and because the petals were somewhat opaque, she couldn’t be sure if what she saw was their color or the color of the walls behind them.

  There were other sounds, a wreath of noises encircling the voice that came up to her—people chattering and something like the tapping of metal fingers, all of it a vague echo. She kept looking for a face, as though she thought the petals might fall in a pattern and form a visage she remembered from somewhere else. She sometimes thought she recognized the voice, but in the midst of the other sounds she wondered if she was imagining it. She could feel the voice in her tubes and her uterus, and the way it threaded up through her belly. It became closer if not louder, never particularly like words to her. It was a rolling syllable, somersaulting up to her in lopsided, unending pirouettes. It was when it became more distinct that she knew it was a stammer, a single letter sustained: a very long L. LLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. In her mind she finished the effort. L-L-Love, l-l-life, l-l-lonely, l-l-light, l-l-luminance, l-l-lascivious, l-l-lady of the l-l-lake, l-l-lately, l-l-lastly, l-l-long long ago.

  L-L-L-L-L-L-L-Lauren.

  She knew it was that all along, really. Lying there, wherever she was, she hadn’t fooled herself. She was waiting to decide how she felt about it, whether the idea that this voice was trying to call her name frightened her, filled her with remorse or comforted her. She didn’t feel threatened by it, but rather by the loss of what to answer to it.

  It seemed ridiculous to her that he would be back inside her. Was he trying again? Was he giving her a second chance? She resented a second chance, because it confirmed the guilt she always believed anyway, and mainly because she wasn’t confident she would do better the second time. And yet this seemed petty to her; she suspected herself of ingratitude; she recognized this was a rare offer of redemption. Wherever he was in her, she couldn’t understand why he was hurting her this much, since she hadn’t known he was there; it wasn’t time for this kind of pain. She realized then he was trapped. The other noises seemed to go away.

  LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. Only more desperately now.

  Lauren. She looked up, and it wasn’t Jules after all. The voice was definitely blue. When he wore the patch over his left eye, she couldn’t remember if he was Michel or Adrien.

  Then she was gone again, and the petals scattered, and there was nothing to hear, and no voice to see.

  She was in the hospital when she awoke, a window by her head overlooking a parking lot. On the wallpaper were long green vines and small yellow blossoms. The bed faced an open door. A nurse appeared and looked at her. “Are you with us?” she said.

  “I think so,” said Lauren.

  The nurse left. From the hall Lauren could hear her. “She’s awake, Doctor.” There was an exchange. The doctor came in with the nurse, and Lauren was pleased that he was handsome like a soap-opera doctor. “You’re awake,” said the doctor. Lauren nodded.

  “Am I O.K.?” she said.

  “Tubular pregnancy. A bit longer and it would have ruptured.” He raised the bed. “More?” Lauren said it was fine. The doctor said calmly, “It was very close.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Someone brought you.”

  “Someone?”

  “Without an eye.”

  She almost said, Oh that phony. There’s nothing wrong with his eye. Instead she said, “Close?”

  “Maybe minutes.”

  She was dazed enough she still didn’t get it for a while, until he left. Immodestly she pulled up her gown and looked at the scar above where her hair had been shaved. It had little staples in it, and she ran her fingers along them gently; it looked like a zipper. Actually, it amused her. She went to sleep and dreamed of open-heart surgery, and zippers beneath each breast.

  There was some more pain, in the moments before she regained consciousness; and then, in the sun that lit her inner lids, his form took shape before her—very blue, like the petals, deepening to black at the top of him. When she saw him there, she knew that wherever and whenever she had seen him before she had seen him much like this, standing at the foot of her bed, perhaps in a long blue coat like that one. When she saw him there, she knew what she’d felt all along. “My one-eyed prince,” she said sarcastically. “My cyclops rescuer.” He watched her intently. She closed her eyes again for a moment and opened them, and looked over the side of the bed. “I’m really in a hospital.”

  He nodded, turning his head from wall to wall. “This is it.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Was I in my apartment?”

  “With the phone off the hook.”

  She waited for him to sit on the bed. She asked, “Are you going to kiss me?”

  “Yeah, I am.” He put his arm on the metal of the bed, and watched her someplace above her brow. She never closed her eyes as he lowered his face to hers. She reached up and put the palm of her hand on his head, and wondered if he was going to say something; his mouth moved as though something was on his lips, and he seemed to barely bite the lower one. I went crazy, he said. He took her in his hands and turned his mouth to hers, like on the stairs; when he did it again she gasped a bit, and thought of zippers. Without thinking she felt her breasts. Why? she said.

  “Because I thought you were dead.”

  “So?”

  He combed back her hair with his fingers.

  “Did you put the phone back?” she said after a minute.

  The one eye opened to her lazily, and he let nothing escape. “So I would not have liked it,” he said, finally.

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Yes,” he answered, almost grimly, “I put the phone back.”

  “I was calling you,” she said, somewhat shocked because she hadn’t planned to say so.

  “I came for you.”

  “Would you have made love to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have taken me if I resisted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have taken me if I resisted completely? If I fought back ferociously?”

  “You would not have.”

  She shook her head. “No. I would not have.”

  “And would you have liked it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean dying.”

  “What?”

  “Would it have meant nothing to you if you were there on the floor dead?”

  “I’ve felt dead a long time.”

  “Because of him?”

  “Partly. Mostly.”

  He nodded.

  “Close call, the doctor said.”

  He nodded.

  “Who are you, Adrien? Michel.”

  He shrugged.

  “Why did you ask if I was ever in Paris? Were you in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  He shifted on the bed.

  “Jason has gone to Europe. Not Paris.”

  He nodded.

  “To race.”

  “Is he a race car driver?”

  “He races bicycles. Almost went to the Olympics in…” She thought. “Seventy-two? Munich.”

  “I don’t think I was in Munich.”

  “I may meet him in Italy in a few months.”

  “I think I was there.”

  “You think?”r />
  “France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium.” He stopped a moment, remembering his passport. “The Netherlands. England. I think.”

  “Jason would have won a silver medal. He filed the wrong papers on one of the preliminary meets, and was disqualified.”

  He said nothing.

  “Does it bother you to hear about him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s my husband,” she said. After a pause she added, “I can’t leave him.”

  He said nothing.

  “Are you French?”

  “No.”

  “I thought—”

  “I’m American. I was born in France.”

  “In Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know where you were born?”

  “No.”

  She just nodded.

  “Odd, huh?” he said.

  “You must have come to America when you were very little.” She offered this idea as though it was something they could speculate on together.

  “I think so, yes.”

  She continued nodding. “Is that why you have a French name?” she asked. “Michel. Adrien too, I suppose.”

  “That’s why.”

  “Is your last name French?”

  He stared at her in a funny way. He seemed to be looking over her face again, his one eye running up and down her. “Sarre,” he said. “That’s French.”

  She repeated it thoughtfully. Then, “Adrien?”

  He smiled.

  “Michel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to kiss me again?”

  “At some risk,” he answered.

  “Why,” she whispered, when his mouth was close to hers, “did you go crazy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What would you have lost if you had lost me?” she whispered.

  He didn’t say, for he couldn’t have explained it. Yet she knew, without him saying it; and as soon as she asked she hoped he didn’t answer, for she couldn’t have stood it for the same reason he couldn’t have said it. And when he kissed her again, she only lay there without opening her eyes, hoping that when she did he would be gone, that he would have left without a trace: because she couldn’t have stood his departure either. There was a twinge below her belly, and then a particularly bad contraction; and by reflex she did open her eyes, and he was gone. He had gone the way she wanted him to, and somehow she knew it was because had she watched him he couldn’t have left her.

  There was the spillage of blue and the red of dusk over the room—a sepia she had seen from her window a thousand dusks; the core of every object deepened in color and the edges streaked dazed and broken. With every glance everything in the room seemed to run and blend. And a thousand dusks had not been like this: there she lay carved, gutted and stapled; and yet not quite ever had she felt this whole. From her window she saw the trees bare and dripping with sand. Old buckets turned in the parking lot, and far beyond the street an old wooden fence leaned north. Several deserted cars lined the curbs; small ridges of the last storm crusted on the windshield wipers. After the amazed exhilaration faded she missed him horribly, once the lights of the hospital hallways shut down and she was alone in the dark. When she woke again at dawn, she was sad and somewhat shocked to find he wasn’t there at the foot of her bed once more.

  She ate breakfast and slept again; and this time she felt his fingers brush the top of her face, and she waited before waking for him to kiss her again. He wore the same blue coat, and had not moved the patch. He brought her a magazine. She made him a list of things she would like, toothpaste and shampoo. The nurse came to change the bed, and Lauren found herself, almost to her own surprise, clutching his arm as he was scurried out of the room. He returned that night and they watched the moonwalk together. He continued to run his fingers over her brow until it was the last thing she remembered. “He was here until midnight,” the nurse told her later. “We had to make him leave.” Once, as the doctor pushed the button to lower her bed, everything stopped, and a brief power shortage left her suspended between up and down. Tomorrow, the doctor told her, we walk.

  Michel came when the doctor was helping Lauren out of bed. Together the three of them walked up and down the hall. She felt a bit of discomfort in her stomach but that was all. She asked the doctor if the staples might fall out before they were supposed to and he said it wasn’t likely if she was careful. Michel stayed, and Lauren showed him the scar. He stared at it blankly and touched it with one finger, saying nothing. Michel said Jason had called. He had been trying their apartment for two days. Michel told him what happened.

  “Where was he?”

  “Pennsylvania. He leaves for Venice next week.” Michel looked out the window. “Unless he decides to come home.”

  “Did you tell him everything?”

  “No.”

  Lauren said, “The doctor told me to go home tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  She nodded. “I can’t make love for three weeks.”

  Jason called that night. He said he would cancel his entry in the rally if Lauren wanted. Or he could get a flight a few weeks later, since the rally wasn’t until the fall. Lauren said it wasn’t necessary. There was nothing he could really do for her, she said. Jason sounded funny when he hung up. She thought: He knows. He has always known. He knew from the first, before any of us. We all know. It’s why it took us two years to meet; it’s why I felt it through the floor.

  The following day Michel stood again at the foot of her bed in his blue coat, his black hair falling down over the patch, barely any expression on his face at all. Impassively he took her bag in one hand and put his other arm around her. They went down the elevator together; when the doors opened, she felt some pain. They walked slowly through the lobby. At the front of the hospital, she clutched at her stomach, felt to see if one of the staples had popped loose, looked to see if blood was spreading in a circle on her gown. There was nothing. The parking lot was streaked with long blue shadows running east.

  He picked her up and carried her; she held the bag in her lap. He walked with her quickly through the automatic glass doors and out into the light. A haze was in the direction of the ocean and a slight wind moved her gown, and brushed her legs. She realized she didn’t know where she was. Everything was still, as though in the time she was away from the world, it had slowed considerably. Are you all right, he said. She hung on with her face in his coat, her hands on the back of his neck. She could feel the buttons against her hair, and pulling herself to him his coat seemed to fall forever, hitting the ground and spreading along the asphalt, as though all this time he’d been wearing his own shadow. Can you stand? he said, just for a moment—and he put her down and she didn’t take her face from his coat but waited. He fumbled in his pocket for the keys. When he got the car door open, he took the bag from her and placed it in the back. He lifted her again to put her on the seat. She took his hair with one hand and his lapel with the other. “I love you, Adrien-Michel,” she whispered. “I don’t want to, but I do.” He looked at her, his mouth never moving, no response on his lips at all; he put her in the car and stood there for a moment still looking at her. He closed the door. He walked around the car, opened the other door, considered and hesitated; he was still. Then, before getting in, he took the patch off his head and dropped it to the ground, where the gust that had rippled past her gown carried it across the lot and past the blank trees until it was no more than a small dark dot.

  He took her home, put her in bed, lifted her gown over her head. He made her some tea and sat and watched her drink it. She kept staring at his face that seemed naked. The extra blueness of the extra eye disturbed her. Aware of it, self-conscious now, he kept glancing down. Then she looked back to the tea.

  At night he took off his clothes and took her in his arms and only then, in the dark, did he begin to talk. He
talked about the years they had been neighbors, and all the times he had seen Jason leaving, and how he had wondered whether she felt alone. He admitted, as she did to him, that he’d avoided her, though he never understood why. She’d become something of a mystery to him, as he had to her, the two of them stranded within their rooms, coming and going invisibly. But when he had seen her there in the crowd at the Blue Isosceles, he knew it wasn’t for the first time, as she had known it wasn’t the first time she saw him.

  It was almost too late, he said. He had come to accept the idea, after two years of looking for a face he knew, that there would never be such a face; and after he came to accept it, he came to depend on it. After being afraid he’d never find it, he became afraid he would. His secret life became safe and comfortable; and when he saw her the first thing he thought was that she was someone who knew more about him than he did—which turned his blood cold, like the movie had done.

  The movie? she said.

  And he told her about the movie, running from the theater at the sight, he realized later, of his own mother, and at the knowledge, he somehow knew immediately, that this was his own work. So he knew, from that and the dream-memories he had, that he was the son of a French woman, born somewhere in France, and that when he was very young two brothers, twins, had drowned one night. And his mother’s brother was a producer in Hollywood who hated him for a reason no one would tell him. And the hostility of his uncle and the terror of his aunt had compelled him to leave as soon as possible, which he had. She asked him if he’d ever seen the film again. He told her no, but he could any time, because it fell into his possession when he came across a trunk of personal effects, and there it was, in its dull metal canister beneath the books and papers. He thought of destroying it that day, and he had thought of destroying it every day since; but instead he stared at it on a shelf, like it was a possessed object which would hurl him across the room at the touch of it.