The Long-Legged Fly

and go as you please, if you can’t find something, ask. Do you need money?”

“I have … an advance, from the people I was going to work for.”

“Okay, then. Goodnight, Cherie.”

“Goodnight, Lew. Bon soir-is that right?”

“As rain.”

I showered and lay listening to the distant clatter of pans and dishes, the irregular rush of water. My childhood rose up around me: myself tucked away in bed while, as on a far-off planet, family life continued.

Soon dishes and kitchen were done and I heard the TV come on. Some vague news about an arms talk, I think; premonitions of continued cold weather; a human interest story about twins in Poland and Gary, Indiana. An old movie with zombies, diplomats, displaced Russian aristocrats, rutting teenaged Americans.

I fell asleep and at some later point woke to the sound of sobbing. Walked into the living room and found a talk show and Cherie asleep on the couch, half-nude, dreaming. Felt the gulf between us, and felt my own loneliness in a way I’d not done for some time.

She was sobbing somewhere deep inside the dream. I think for a moment I felt as parents feel, wanting to protect her at any cost, to lie or tell her whatever might calm her sleep, ease her waking. But parents, most parents, learn that can’t be done. They learn that, whoever we are, all we can really share is the common humanity that bonds us: the knowledge that we all hurt, that every choice is difficult and, in its own way, final.

I fetched some blankets from the closet and covered her, turned the TV off, returned to bed.

Either it’s only in the relationships we manage that we live at all, or we must think that in order to manage them in the first place. We go on trying not just to survive, but to find reasons, such as love, that allow us to betray ourselves into choosing survival.

In my dreams Martin Luther King was reading Black No More. Tears streamed down his face: rain on a window behind which there is laughter.

At some point Vicky was there, muttering something about croissants; then, later, we were making love, and later still (I think) there was somehow coffee beside the bed. Gradually I was awake and it was dark. I thought how recent days were like older ones, going by in a blur, undistinguished, largely unlived, so many twilights retreating into bleary dawns.

Finally a knock at the door, repeated twice.

“There’s dinner, when you want it.” Footsteps leaving.

We showered together and went to see.

A stew of chicken and vegetables, spinach tossed with egg and vinaigrette, pasta salad, fried bananas. Freshly ground coffee after.

“This time I do the dishes,” I said.

And did so, listening to the chirr of their conversation in the next room. Vicky had spoken with the head of volunteer services and the nursing director; both wanted to see Cherie for interviews.

I remembered Jimmi sitting up in bed without clothes reading Principles of Economy, thought of the first time I saw Vicky, just so much red hair floating above me, of how Cherie had looked so very young in the photograph and (as Vicky said) like someone who knows the best part of her life is already over.

Maybe the best parts of our lives are always over. Maybe happiness, contentment, are things we only recollect through the filters of time, elusive ghosts forever behind us.

In the next room they laughed together, Vicky’s an easy, rolling laugh, Cherie’s curiously childlike, and I thought: that’s really the only answer we have, laughter. For a long time after it was over I stood listening.

Chapter Eight

A few weeks later Vicky and I were standing together at New Orleans International. The weather had gone suddenly, unseasonably warm. We watched a small private plane gather speed and tear itself away from the earth. Earlier Don, Sansom and some others had been over for drinks and good-byes. Now it was our turn.

“I don’t know what might make you happy, Lew,” she said, “But whatever it is, I hope you’ll find it.”

“Or give up trying?”

“Quite.” She put her hand over mine on the railing. We could feel the heat through the window. I would never forget her eyes, the way her mouth shaped itself around words as they left it. “You didn’t know, but when I met you I had decided already to leave, to go home. I was never certain why I didn’t, not until you came to Hotel Dieu and found me. Only then did I realize that was what I had waited for.”

“I was in pretty terrible shape when you met me, Vicky.”

“Aren’t we all…. You know where I’ll be, Lew. You can come anytime, if you change your mind.”

“And you’ll be waiting?”

“Waiting, no. But I will be there for you if you come. This has all been something very special for me, Lew.” She held her hand up by her heart, closed, then slowly opened it.

Eventually her flight was called, we fumbled through final farewells and awkward embraces, and she followed the laws of perspective down an embarkation tunnel.

I went to the bar for a drink and ran into a guy I’d gone to high school with and hadn’t seen since. Vicky had sold the car just before leaving. He was a cabbie now and offered me a free run home. But when we walked out a couple of hours and several drinks later, there was Verne leaning against the streetlight at the corner.

“Need a ride home, soldier? I’ve got my car.”

“I hope you don’t mind, Lew,” she said, feinting her way onto the expressway. “I know what just went down. Thought you could use a friend about now.”

“And always. But what about your doctor?”

She shrugged. “History.”

I watched her face pass through lights like a boat over waves.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ve kept up, Lew. I talked to Don Walsh and some others, I always knew how you were, what you were up to.”

“You should have called. Or just come by.”

She shook her head. Several blocks passed beneath us as we curved across the city’s sky.

“Are you working?”

“Yeah,” she said, and laughed. “At a rape crisis center-can you feature that? For a long time now.”

“You get paid?”

“Sometimes.”

A little later she looked over at me and said, “Where’ll it be, Lew?”

“I don’t want to go back to my place.”

“I thought you might not. There’s always mine.”

“Catching balls on the rebound?”

She shrugged. “Whatever works. You wait and see.”

“Right,” I said. “You wait and see.”

Part Four

1990