worries and, in fact, something not even to be considered.
She was conscious of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital and she was conscious of being put in the bed in the white hospital room, but by now this was not happening to her. It was happening to someone she had created and it was not true. She could step away from this whenever she wished. She was safe now. At that moment she felt another terrible blow and lost consciousness.
On the day after New Year’s I got the phone call from Alice. I was mildly surprised to hear her voice; in fact, I didn’t recognize it until she told me her name. The first thing that flashed through my mind was that Janelle needed help in some way.
“Merlyn, I thought you’d want to know,” Alice said. “It’s been a long time, but I thought I should tell you what happened.”
She paused, her voice uncertain. I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “I have some bad news about Janelle. She’s in the hospital. She had a cerebral hemorrhage.”
I didn’t really grasp what she was saying, or my mind refused the facts. It registered as an illness only. “How is she?” I asked. “Was it very bad?”
Again there was that pause, then Alice said, “She’s living on machines. The tests show no brain activity.”
I was very calm, but I still didn’t really grasp it. I said, “Are you telling me that she’s going to die? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No, I’m not telling you that,” Alice said. “Maybe she’ll recover, maybe they can keep her alive. Her family’s coming out and they’ll make all the decisions. Do you want to come out? You can stay at my place.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.” And I really couldn’t “Will you call me tomorrow and tell me what happens? I’ll come out if I can help, but not for anything else.”
There was a long silence, and then Alice said, her voice breaking. “Merlyn, I sat beside her, she looks so beautiful, as if nothing happened to her. I held her hand and it was warm. She looks as if she were just sleeping. But the doctors say that there’s nothing left of her brain. Merlyn, could they be wrong? Could she get better?”
And at moment I felt certain it was all a mistake, that Janelle would recover. Cully had said once that a man could sell himself anything in his own hand and that’s what I did. “Alice, the doctors are wrong sometimes, maybe she’ll get better. Don’t give up hope.”
“All right,” Alice said. She was crying now. “Oh, Merlyn, it’s so terrible. She lies there on the bed asleep like some fairy princess and I keep thinking some magic can happen, that she’ll be all right. I can’t think of living without her. And I can’t leave her like that. She would hate to live like that. If they don’t pull the plug, I will. I won’t let her live like that.”
Ah, what a chance it was for me to be a hero. A fairy princess dead in an enchantment and Merlyn the Magician knowing how to wake her. But I didn’t offer to help pull the plug. “Wait and see what happens,” I said. “Call me, OK?”
“OK,” Alice said. “I just thought you’d want to know. I thought you might want to come out.”
“I really haven’t seen her or spoken to her for a long time,” I said. And I remember Janelle asking, “Would you deny me?” and my saying laughingly, “With all my heart.”
Alice said, “She loved you more than any other man.”
But she didn’t say “more than anybody,” I thought. She left out women. I said, “Maybe she’ll be OK. Will you call me again?”
“Yes,” Alice said. Her voice was calmer now. She had begun to grasp my rejection and she was bewildered by it. “I’ll call you as soon as something happens.” Then she hung up.
And I laughed. I don’t know why I laughed, but I just laughed. I couldn’t believe it, it must be one of Janelle’s tricks. It was too outrageously dramatic, something I knew she had fantasized about and so had arranged this little charade. And one thing I knew, I would never look upon her empty face, her beauty vacated by the brain behind it. I would never, never look at it because I would be turned to stone. I didn’t feel any grief or sense any loss. I was too wary for that. I was too cunning. I walked around the rest of the day, shaking my head. Once again I laughed and later I caught myself with my face twisting in a kind of smirk, like someone with a guilty secret wish come true, or of someone who is finally trapped forever.
Alice called me late the next day. “She’s all right now,” Alice said.
And for a minute I thought she meant it, that Janelle had recovered, that it had all been a mistake. And then Alice said, “We pulled the plug. We took her off the machines and she’s dead.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time, and then she asked, “Are you going to come out for the funeral? We’re going to have a memorial service in the theater. All her friends are coming. It’s going to be a party with champagne and all her friends giving speeches about her. Will you come?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll come in a couple of weeks to see you if you don’t mind. But I can’t come now.”
There was another long pause if she were trying to control her anger, and then she said, “Janelle once told me to trust you, so I do. Whenever you want to come out, I’ll see you.”
And then she hung up.
The Xanadu Hotel loomed before me, its million-dollar marquee of bright lights drowned the lonely hills beyond. I walked past it, dreaming of those happy days and months and years I had spent seeing Janelle. Since Janelle’s death I had thought of her nearly every day. Some mornings I’d wake up thinking about her, imagining how she looked, how she could be so affectionate and so furious at the same time.
Those first few minutes awake I always believed she was alive. I’d imagine scenes between us when we met again. It took me five or ten minutes to remember she was dead. With Osano and Artie this had never happened. In fact, I rarely thought of them now. Did I care for her more? But then if I felt that way about Janelle, why my nervous laugh when Alice told me the news over the phone? Why, during the day I heard of her death, did I laugh to myself three or four times? And I realize now perhaps it was because I was enraged with her for dying. In time, if she had lived, I would have forgotten her. By her trickery she would haunt me all my life.
When I saw Alice a few weeks after Janelle’s death, I learned that the cerebral hemorrhage came from a congenital defect which Janelle may have known about.
I remembered how angry I was when she was late or the few times she forgot the day on which we were supposed to meet. I was so sure they were Freudian slips, her unconscious wish to reject me. But Alice told me that this had happened often with Janelle. And had gotten worse shortly before her death. It was certainly linked to the bulging aneurysm, the fatal leakage into her brain. And then I remembered that last night with her when she had asked me if I loved her and I had answered her so insolently. And I thought if she could only ask me now, how different I would be. That she could be and say and do whatever she wishes. That I would accept anything she wanted to be. That just the thought that I could see her, that she was someplace I could go to, that I could hear her voice or hear her laugh would be the things that could make me happy. “Ah, then,” I could hear her ask, pleased but angry too, “but is it the important thing to you?” She wanted to be the most important thing to me and to everyone she knew and, if possible, to everyone in the world. She had an enormous hunger for affection. I thought of bitter remarks for her to make to me as she lay in bed, her brain shattered as I looked down upon her with grief. She would say, “Isn’t this the way you wanted me? Isn’t that the way men want women? I would think this would be ideal for you.” But then I realized she never would have been so cruel or even so vulgar, and then I realized another odd thing. My memories of her were never about our lovemaking.
I know I dream of her many times at night, but I never remember those dreams. I just wake up thinking about her as if she were still alive.
I was on the very top of the Strip, in the shadow of the Nevada mountains, looking down into the huge, glittering neon nest that was the heart of Vegas. I would gamble tonight and in the early morning I’d catch a plane for New York. Tomorrow night I would sleep with my family in my own house and work on my books in my solitary room. I would be safe.
I entered the doors of the Xanadu casino. I was chilled by the frozen air. Two spade hookers went gliding by arm in arm, their heavy curly wigs glistening, one dark chocolate, the other sweetly brown. Then white hookers
