Drunk with Love, page 2
“I don’t think it does.”
“Well, get out and let’s go see if I can figure out a way to drink a cup of coffee without making a goddamn fool of myself.” He knocked the door open with his elbow and stepped out onto Telegraph Avenue. Seven people were around him by the time Nora Jane could come around the other way. Three people who already knew and loved him and four more who wanted to. He’s a hero, Nora Jane was thinking. Why would anybody like that want to like me anyway?
The next morning Nora Jane went down to the Berkeley Women’s Clinic and had the amniocentesis. Afterwards she was going to meet Nieman and Freddy for lunch. She got up early and dressed up in a jade green silk dress, which was beginning to be too tight around the hips, and she screwed her face together and walked into the clinic determined to go through with it.
The first thing she had to do was take off the dress. Next she had to lie down on a bed surrounded by machinery, and in a moment she was watching the inside of her uterus on a television screen. “Oh, oh,” the technician said. The doctor laughed.
“What happened?” Nora Jane said. “What’s wrong?”
“There’re two of them,” the doctor said. “I thought so by the heartbeats. You’ve got twins.” He squeezed her hand. The technician beamed, as delighted as if he had had something to do with it.
“What do you mean?” Nora Jane sat up on her elbow.
“Two babies in there. Identical by the looks of it. I think it’s one sac. Can’t be sure.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Be still now. Lie back. We’re going to begin the amnio. It won’t take long. It’s all right. Don’t worry. Hold Jamie’s hand. Oh, that’s a good girl.” Then Nora Jane squeezed her eyes and her fists and the needle penetrated her skin and moved down into the sac Lydia and Tammili were swimming in and took one ounce of amniotic fluid and withdrew. The doctor secured the test tube, rubbed a spot on Nora Jane’s stomach with alcohol and patted her on the leg. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “Now we’ll get you out of here so you can celebrate.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t believe it’s true.”
“We’ll give you a picture to take home with you. How about that?” An hour later Nora Jane left the clinic carrying in her purse an envelope containing a photograph of Tammili and Lydia floating around her womb. This is too much knowledge, she decided. This is more than I need to know.
“What’s this all about?” Nieman said. He was at an upstairs table at Chez Panisse holding Freddy’s hand while the test went on. “Stop chewing your bandages, Freddy. Talk to me.”
“She fucked this crazy bastard she used to go with in New Orleans. One afternoon when she was mad at me, so she doesn’t know if the baby’s mine. I should have killed him the minute I saw him. He’s a goddamn criminal, Nieman. I ought to have him put in jail. Well, never mind, he isn’t here anyway. So she’s having this amniocentesis and she won’t get the results for about a month anyway. I’m going crazy. You know that. Everything happens to me. You know it does. I’m probably going to lose my left hand.”
“No you aren’t. Stuart said it was healing. Besides, you’re a hero. It was worth it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“So when will she find out?”
“I don’t know. Who knows anything anymore. Well, I’m marrying her anyway if I can talk her into it. I can’t live without her. You wouldn’t believe how goddamn much my hands hurt at night. That goddamn Stuart won’t give me a thing.”
“Have you heard from the kids, the ones you saved?”
“Of course I have. They write me every other day. They’ve written me about ten letters. I’m going to get them into Camp Minnesota next year. I was thinking about that this morning. I’ll take them up there as soon as they’re old enough.” Freddy still went to his old camp every summer. He was a senior counselor. Nieman looked away. Freddy’s friends never mentioned his camp to him. They liked to talk about that behind his back. “Well,” Nieman said. “Here she comes. You want me to leave?”
“Of course not, Nieman. This is Berkeley. Not Ohio. What’s happening?” He stood up and held out a chair for Nora Jane and gave her a small quick kiss on the side of the face. Freddy was in extremely high gear this morning. Even for him he was running very tight and hot. He handed Nora Jane her napkin, laid it in her lap. “What did they say?”
“It’s two babies. It’s going to be twins. I have a picture of them if you’d like to see it.” She fished it out of her purse and Freddy held it up to the light and looked at it.
“A month?” Freddy said. “Well, let’s eat lunch. A month, huh? Thirty days.”
“I don’t think they’re yours,” she said. She was looking straight at him. “The right time of month when I was with Sandy. You never listen when I tell you that.” Nieman coughed and drank his wine and signaled to the waiter for some more.
“The role of will is underrated in human affairs,” Freddy said. “To tell the truth, Miss Whittington, you have driven me crazy. Have I told you that today?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she answered. “You’re the one that thought up sleeping with me.” Nieman rose a few inches from his chair and caught the waiter’s eye. Nothing human is foreign to me, he said to himself, as he did about a hundred times a day.
II
Sandy, the beautiful and mysterious Sandy George Wade of Louisiana and Texas and nowhere. Abandoned when he was six years old, after which he roamed the world playing out that old scenario, doing things to please people and make them love him, then doing things to make them desert him. It was all he knew. One of the people he talked into caring for him was a drunken poet who taught English at his reform school in Texas. The poet taught him to love poetry and to wield it with his voice and eyes. Nora Jane was a sucker for poetry. When they lived together in New Orleans Sandy had been able to get her to forgive him anything by quoting Dylan Thomas or A. E. Housman or a poem by Auden called “Petition,” which ends with a plea to “Look shining at, new styles of architecture, a change of heart.” Nora Jane always took that to mean she was supposed to think anything Sandy did was all right with advanced thinkers like poets.
Now, on the same day that Nora Jane was having her amniocentesis, Sandy was sitting alone in his room in Mirium Sallisaw’s tacky West Coast mansion thinking of ways to get Nora Jane to forgive him and take him back as her mate and child and live-in boyfriend. Sandy worked for Mirium Sallisaw in her cancer business. She sold trips to Mexico for miracle cures. She had made several million dollars collecting the life savings of terminal cancer patients and she paid Sandy well to be her driver.
In his spare time Sandy had been talking to Mirium’s psychoanalyst and he was beginning to see that some of the things he had done might actually be affecting the lives of other people, especially and specifically Nora Jane, who was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He paced around his room and lay down on his bed and thought up a thousand tricks to get her back. Finally he decided to sit down and write out his frustration in a poem and have Mirium’s Federal Express Service deliver it. By the time he had finished it he was so excited he abandoned the Federal Express idea and drove into town and delivered it himself. She was not there, so he left it in the mailbox.
Nora Jane found the poem when she got home from lunch at Chez Panisse. She had spent the afternoon arguing with Freddy about whether they should get married and finally, when she left him at his house, she had agreed to consider a trial marriage for the duration of her pregnancy.
Now she walked up onto the porch of the beige and green house where she had a room and saw the piece of paper sticking out of her mailbox. She knew what it was. No one in her life had left her things sticking out of mailboxes except Sandy. Sandy was one of the few young men left in the Western world who understood the power of written communications. There it was, sticking out and beckoning to her as she walked by the red salvia and the madrone hedge and the poppies. She pulled it out and sat down on the stairs to read.
Jane, Jane, where can you be?
Flown so very far from me.
The golden rain trees are blooming now
Above the house where we once lived.
Could we go there once again?
Could we recapture the love we had?
She folded it up and put it back into its envelope and went into the house and called him up.
“Come on over,” she said. “I have a lot to tell you.”
“What is that?” he answered.
“You won’t believe it, I’m going to have two babies about six months from now.”
“You mean that, don’t you?”
“I think they’re yours but I’m not sure. Are you coming?”
“As fast as I can get there.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
He arrived at eight o’clock that night, pulling up to the curb in Mirium Sallisaw’s white Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It was the car he used to drive her clients down to Mexico to the Laetrile clinic and to Las Vegas to get their bootleg Interferon. It was weird and depressing work and Sandy had been saving his money so he could quit. He was up to about four thousand dollars in savings on the night Nora Jane told him she was pregnant. He sped along the freeway thinking what a small sum it was, wondering where in the world he would get some more.
Nora Jane was waiting for him on the steps. He took her into his arms and the old magic was as good as new. The poem he had written to her was true. Back in New Orleans the golden rain trees were covering their old roof with golden dust. “That stuff is made of stars,” Sandy had told her once. “And we are too.”
“I love you,” he told her now. “God, I’ve been missing you.”
“I miss you too,” she answered.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such an asshole. I don’t know what makes me act that way.”
“It’s okay. It was half my fault. Come on in. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
It was some hours later and the moon was shining in on her small white bed with her new lace-trimmed sheets and the lace-trimmed pillowcases and the yellow lilies in a vase she had run out and bought when she knew he was coming. She was wrapped up in his arms. She had told him all she knew. Now she was finishing her speech. “I’m going to have them no matter whose they are. It’s all I know for sure. I don’t care what anyone says. Or who gets mad at me.”
“Don’t sound like that. I want them. I want them to be mine so much I’d reach inside and touch them.” He ran his hands across her stomach. “Listen, baby, we’re going to get out of here and get a place together and start living like white people. I’ve had all I can take of loneliness. You can call the shots. You tell me what you want and I’ll deliver. I’m quitting Mirium. I’ve got four grand saved up in the bank and that will tide us over. I’m going to an employment agency tomorrow and see what they can offer. I’ll take anything they offer me.” He got up from the bed and pulled a package of cigarettes out of his pants and lit one and stood in the window smoking. The moonlight was on his body. He was so graceful it broke Nora Jane’s heart to look at him. He was the most beautiful and graceful person she had ever watched or seen. Everything he did made sense in the beauty of movement department. Watching him now, so beautiful and perfect, she thought about a terrible story he told her about being left somewhere when he was small and standing by the door for days waiting for his mother to come back but she didn’t come. “Oh, Sandy,” Nora Jane got up and stood behind him, holding him in her arms. “I will never leave you again no matter what happens or what you do. I will stick by you if you want me to.” Then she was crying tears all over his beautiful graceful back.
Across the campus of the University of California at Berkeley Freddy Harwood was in his hot tub getting drunk. His bandaged hand was propped up on a shoe rack and a bottle of WSOP Napoleon brandy was by the soap dish and he was talking on the remote-control phone. “She hasn’t even called and she isn’t there. It means she’s with him. I know it. She’s bound to be. I’ve had it, Nieman. Life’s not doing this to me. I’m getting out. I mean it. I’m getting into dope or moving to New York or paddling up to Canada in a birchbark canoe. None of it is funny anymore. The whole thing sucks and you know it. The whole show. You goddamn well know it. I would take any age over this age. Fuck it all to goddamn bloody fucking hell. That’s all I’ve got to say. I’m through.”
Nieman said he would come over.
“Well, hurry up. I’m in deep, old buddy. I lost my sense of reality a while ago. I mean, I didn’t do anything to deserve this. This is fucking unfair. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Nieman said he was on his way. He called up Freddy’s old girlfriend, Buiji Dalton, and told her to meet him there. Then he called a friend of theirs named Teddy who was a psychotherapist and told him to get in his car. They converged on Freddy’s house. It was a wooden house with great glass wings that swept the horizon for miles across San Francisco and the bridges and the bay.
It had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It had paintings by every major painter who had worked in the United States in the last twenty years. It had books in six languages and light and air and was full of food and wine and bottled water from Missouri that tasted like honey. In the middle of the patio, looking out on the bay, was the hot tub where Freddy was contemplating suicide or having a prefrontal lobotomy or taking heroin every day. “The pain,” he was saying into his tape recorder. “This is real pain. This is not some figment of my imagination. This is not just trying to get something that’s hard to get. I don’t want her because she’s hard to get. I want her because I like to look at her and if those aren’t my babies in there it’s all over, she will never marry me. I risked my life to save two small children. I walked into a burning building. It isn’t fair. IT IS NOT FAIR. I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.” He turned off the recording machine and called Nieman back. “You haven’t left yet?”
“I was going out the door.”
“Have you got a tape of Network, that movie with Peter Finch as the television announcer who gets all the people yelling out the windows?”
“I think so.”
“Bring it over, will you?”
Freddy laid down the phone and turned the recorder back on. “Bitter,” he said into the microphone. “Bitter, bitter, bitter, jaded, tired of life and cynical. No good for anything anymore. Nothing works. The system fucks.”
Clouds of vapor were rolling in from the Pacific Ocean. In a petri dish near the Berkeley campus Tammili and Lydia Whittington’s identical DNA began to give up its secrets to the Chinese student who was working overtime to make money to bring his sister to the United States from Singapore. “Very interesting,” he thought. He added one drop of a chemical and watched the life below him form and re-form. AB positive, universal donors, he wrote on a pad. He translated it into Chinese with a few brief strokes of his pen. This case interested him very much. He wrote down the name, Nora Jane Whittington. Yes, when he got home he would cast the I Ching and see what else was in store for these baby girls with the lucky blood. Lin Tan, for that was his name, moved the dish to one side and picked up the next one.
Sandy got back into bed with Nora Jane and cuddled her up into his arms. He kissed her hair and then her eyes. He arranged their bodies so they fit against each other very comfortably and perfectly. He heaved a sigh. It was so fragile. It never stayed. It always deserted him. It always went away. It was here now. It would go away. It would leave him alone. “Calm down,” she said. “Don’t get scared. We don’t have to be unhappy if we don’t want to.”
“When will you know?”
“They said a month. They’re busy. So what kind of blood do you have anyway? I’m B positive.”
“It’s some weird shit. I’ve forgotten. I’ll call and find out.”
“Go to sleep. We’ll make it.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I love you too.”
Freddy got out of the hot tub. He was the color of a sunset at Malibu when there were plenty of clouds. Buiji Dalton took a big white towel and began to dry him off. She’d been trying to marry him for his money for five years and she wasn’t giving up now. Not with all she had to offer. Not after she had divorced Dudley and only kept the house. “I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. I cut it out and showed it to everyone. I made a hundred copies and mailed them to people. I’m so proud of you.”
“Hey, stop that, will you?”
“What?”
“Drying me. I’m okay. Come on. Let’s go in the bedroom and watch this movie. It’s the greatest movie made in the United States in four years and Nieman had to go and trash it. He trashed it. Wait till you see it. I want you to tell him what you think when it’s over.”
“Do you want anything to eat?”
“No, just get me that brandy, will you?” Freddy draped the towel over his shoulder and pulled the other part across his stomach to cover his reproductive organs and went into his bedroom and got into bed with his best friend and his old girlfriend on either side of him and pushed a button and the movie started. Freddy had changed his mind about suicide. After all, Nora Jane was practically illiterate. She had never even read Dostoevski. The copyright warning appeared on the screen. His psychiatrist friend, Teddy, came tearing into the room waving a bag from the deli. He took up the other side of Buiji Dalton and the movie began.
