Extraordinary

“In exchange for what?”

“That’s exactly what I said. But it turned out, in exchange for nothing. In fact, the guy wrote the cheques on his wife’s account.” I went on: “I’ve often wondered about that gesture, her writing strangers and asking for money with the assurance of an adored child. Where did she get the outrageous confidence? And it occurs to me, and not without a certain envy, that the answer lies in the question. She was an adored child. And that’s you, Sally. That’s you.”

We both sat silently for a while. Then Sally said, “I’m not making excuses for Chloe, for her cutting me out of whole sections of her life, but she had to do a lot of things that most young girls don’t, things that they usually have done for them. She had to learn to shop for groceries, to buy brown bread and not white bread, to buy healthy morning cereal, not the sugary junk her friends ate; how to detect a fresh cantaloupe; how to separate the whites from the darks downstairs in the laundry room; how to make scrambled eggs (no milk at a low heat). How to drive a car in the winter (turn into the skid). She had to learn not to forget her lunch, because she had a mother who couldn’t pop by the school and drop it off. All that must have been a hardship.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, “but it made her exceptionally able.”

“Almost frighteningly able. But go on, please.”

“It must have been a lonely time, those first few months in an American city. Setting up a little apartment, eating dinner alone. Trying to make friends without seeming too hungry for friends. She started to phone me again. Chloe only phones me when she’s bleak. But that’s fine. She joined a ‘Newcomers to Berkeley’ society; she even went to church a few times. She went to Alcoholics Anonymous, not because she had a drinking problem but because there were people there. Because they all went out for coffee after the meeting and everyone was welcome.

“And then, one rainy November night, a young woman stepped out of the rain, folded up her umbrella and joined the circle of chairs. It was Miranda Treece, her old nemesis from Montreal. And she did have a drinking problem. She had done very little with her life in the intervening years except live on her family’s money and fuck a whole bunch of guys. She’d washed up in Berkeley on the heels of a failed romance and didn’t have the steam to leave town. I don’t know the details or even the timing, but one day Chloe found a small parcel in her mailbox. She opened it up. It was a T-shirt. And with it was a short handwritten note: I wore this for three days. If you like how it smells, call me. It was signed Miranda. And that, as they say, was that.”

I looked over at Sally. She was frowning as if she had not heard me correctly. But I wanted her to hear the end of the story before she responded. “Chloe has always been strangely private about that chapter of her life, even with me. Which is funny, because she could be alarmingly candid about her goings-on with men. Not with this, though. But when I saw her coming out of a movie theatre in Toronto with Miranda one afternoon a year or two later, there was a bloom on her cheeks, those lovely cheeks that had made me so sad that Sunday afternoon on the sidewalk. It was the kind of illumination that even a fool can see comes from being physically loved.”

I stopped talking. We both watched the candle flame for a while. Another plane, its tail illuminated like that of a bright red goldfish, descended over the airport. The events that happened in the wake of this conversation still seem extraordinary to me, the way life does and doesn’t work out. And for whom. But here’s something that did work out. Let’s jump ahead eight or nine years after that evening on the eighteenth floor. Chloe and Miranda came over to my apartment for dinner with their two children in tow (gay dads, turkey baster, enough said). Watching them from where I sat at the end of the table, I couldn’t help reflecting on how delicious, how mysterious it was that Miranda, this great love of Chloe’s life, now her legal wife, was the same girl who had once routed her for a boy who currently, I’m told, delivers booze in a little green car for an after-hours supplier. Near the end of the night, Miranda did a perfect handstand in the kitchen. The children were beside themselves with wonder. It turned out she’d been the San Antonio gymnastics champion during her last year of high school.

Five

It was nearly three in the morning now. The hum from the refrigerator clicked off, leaving the room in audible silence. It seemed as though the curtains, the lamps, the pictures on the wall were all waiting too. I was standing at the window looking down at the parking lot. A man in a white jacket moved between the cars and stepped under a spotlight. He looked up. We looked at each other for an unnaturally long time. Then he waved, a big wide wave as though he were on a boat and trying to catch the attention of a passing freighter. But I didn’t wave back. He seemed like bad luck and I stepped away from the window.

Sally came out of the bathroom and sat down heavily on the indentation on the couch, her usual place, and put her crutches carefully to one side, held them in place for a moment to be sure they didn’t wobble over. “I’m ready to do this thing now,” she said.

I looked at her face. It was grey and a little puffy, the face of an exhausted person, a party-goer who has come to the end of the night, knows it, but is too exhausted, among the wilting flowers and sweating cheese and lipstick-stained wineglasses, to get up and make it across the room to the door. Too tired to enjoy staying, too tired to leave.

I leaned forward in my chair. I closed my fingers together and then stretched them out. I saw she was watching my fingers. Then she looked up at me with a soft smile. “Could we skip this next part?”

I knew what she meant, of course, but I needed to hear her say it. “Which part would that be?”

“The questions that have obviously occurred to me a thousand times.”

“And tonight’s the night?”

“If you love me, please don’t make me plead.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have them?”

“Yes.”

“Are they with you?”

I took the dark bottle from my shoulder bag, which I had laid on the floor beside my chair.

“Are there enough?”

“Yes, Sally, there are enough.”

“I don’t have to take, like, two hundred of them, do I?”

“No.”

“How many do I have to take?”

“Thirty. Tops.”

She looked at the bottle. “It looks scary, that bottle. Can’t we put them in something else?”

I got up, went into the kitchen, opened the pill bottle, removed the cotton batten (we didn’t need a sinister rattle coming from my bag as I crossed the room).

The phone rang again.

“Who the hell is that?” she said.

“Should I get it?”

“God, no. Please don’t. Let’s get on with this.” After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to throw up, be found half alive in a pool of vomit and spend the rest of my days with the IQ of a cabbage.”

“You know, Sally, for someone who says she’s had enough, you’re an awfully amusing woman.”

“Death concentrates the mind. I must have read that somewhere.”

“No, I believe that’s an original.”

She thought about it for a second; quietly mouthed the words again. “You’re sure? I don’t want to go out on a plagiarized note.”

“It’s yours. Straight up.”

“Where were we?” she said. I was about to open my mouth to protest, but she silenced me with a tilt of her head, a reminder to not make her plead.

I said, “Let’s have a drink first.”