She said nothing.
“It didn’t do too much damage,” the policeman said. “You can call in the morning and get a copy of this report if you need it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He touched his cap. “Less fun than digging out Santa and his reindeer,” he said, looking back at the car, tilted onto the lawn. “Have a good Christmas, ma’am,” he said.
He turned and left, and she closed the door. With the click, she remembered everything. Earlier in the evening she had gone upstairs to tell Nicholas that she was sorry they had ended up in a quarrel on Christmas Eve. She had said she wanted him to come back downstairs. She had said it through the closed door, pleading with him, with her mouth close to the blank white panel of wood. When the door opened at last, and she saw Nicholas standing there in his pajamas, she had braced herself by touching her fingers to the door frame, shocked to realize that he was real, and that he was there. He was looking into her eyes—a person she had helped to create—and yet, when he wasn’t present, seeing him in her mind would have been as strange as visualizing a Christmas ornament out of season.
Nicholas’s hair was rumpled, and he looked at her with a tired, exasperated frown. “Charlotte,” he said, “why didn’t you come up hours ago? I went down and let the dog in. You’ve been out like a light half the night. Nobody’s supposed to say that you drink. Nobody’s supposed to see you. If you don’t ask any questions, we’re supposed to stop noticing you. Nobody’s supposed to put you on the spot, are they? You only talk to Father Curnan, and he prays for you.”
Downstairs in the dark hallway now, she shuddered, remembering how she had felt when he said that. She had gone back downstairs and huddled in the chair—all right, she had had too much to drink—but it was she who had woken up and been alert to squealing tires and people screaming, and Nicholas who had slept. Also, she thought, relief suddenly sweeping through her, he couldn’t have been as angry as he seemed. He must have put the pin on her coat after the party—after their words in the car—or even when he had come downstairs to let Horatio in and had seen her asleep or passed out in the chair. He must have pinned it onto her lapel when the coat still hung in the closet, so she would find it there the next day. She had found it early, inadvertently, when she went out to investigate the car and the noise.
She looked at the dog. He was watching her, as usual.
“Are you real good, or not a guard dog to begin with?” she whispered. Then she pulled the cord. Santa’s face lit up. She pulled the cord again, several times, smiling as the dog watched. Over her shoulder, she looked at the kitchen clock. It was three-fifty Christmas morning.
“Come on,” she whispered, pulling the cord another time. “I’ve done my trick. Now you do yours.”
Second Question
There we were, in the transfusion room at the end of the corridor at Bishopgate Hospital: Friday morning, the patients being dripped with blood or intravenous medicine so they could go home for the weekend. It was February, and the snow outside had turned the gritty gray of dirty plaster. Ned and I stood at the window, flanking a card table filled with desserts: doughnuts, cakes, pies, brownies, cookies. Some plastic forks and knives were piled in stacks, others dropped pick-up-sticks style between the paper plates. Ned surveyed the table and took a doughnut. In his chair, Richard was sleeping, chin dropped, breathing through his mouth. Half an hour into the transfusion, he always fell asleep. He was one of the few who did. A tall, redheaded man, probably in his mid-fifties, was hearing from a nurse about the hair loss he could expect. “Just remember, honey, Tina Turner wears a wig,” she said.
Outside, bigger snowflakes fell, like wadded-up tissues heading for the trash. Which was what I had turned away from when I went to the window: the sight of a nurse holding a tissue for a young woman to blow her nose into. The woman was vomiting, with her nose running at the same time, but she refused to relinquish the aluminum bowl clamped under her thumbs. “Into the tissue, honey,” the nurse was still saying, not at all distracted by her posturing colleague’s excellent imitation of Tina Turner. I’d stopped listening, too, but I’d stuck on the phrase “Gonna break every rule.”
Richard was dying of AIDS. Ned, his ex-lover and longtime business associate, found that instead of reading scripts, typing letters, and making phone calls, his new job description was to place organically grown vegetables in yin/yang positions inside a special steamer, below which we boiled Poland Spring water. A few months earlier, in that period before Richard’s AZT had to be discontinued so that he could enter an experimental outpatient- treatment program at Bishopgate, Ned had always slept late. He couldn’t call the West Coast before two in the afternoon, anyway—or maybe an hour earlier, if he had the unlisted number of an actor or of a director’s car phone. All of the people Richard and Ned did business with worked longer hours than nine-to-fivers, and it was a standing joke among us that I was never busy—I had no real job, and when I did work I was paid much more than was reasonable. Ned joked with me a lot, an edge in his voice, because he was a little jealous of the sudden presence of a third person in Richard’s apartment. Richard and I had met in New York when we were seated in adjacent chairs at a cheapo haircutter’s on Eighth Avenue. He thought I was an actress in an Off Broadway play he’d seen the night before. I was not, but I’d seen the play. As we talked, we discovered that we often ate at the same restaurants in Chelsea. His face was familiar to me, as well. Then began years of our being neighbors—a concept more important to New Yorkers than to people living in a small town. The day we met, Richard took me home with him so I could shower.
That year, my landlord on West Twenty-seventh Street remained unconcerned that hot water rarely made it up to my top-floor apartment. After I met Richard it became a habit with me to put on my sweatsuit and jog to his apartment, three blocks east and one block over. Richard’s own landlord, who lived in the other second-floor apartment, could never do enough for him, because Richard had introduced him to some movie stars and invited him to so many screenings. He would sizzle with fury over the abuse I had to endure, working himself up to what Richard (who made
I turned away from the snowstorm. On a TV angled from a wall bracket above us, an orange-faced Phil Donahue glowed. He shifted from belligerence to incredulity as a man who repossessed cars explained his life philosophy. Hattie, the nicest nurse on the floor, stood beside me briefly, considering the array of pastry on our table as if it were a half-played chess game. Finally, she picked up one of the plastic knives, cut a brownie in half, and walked away without raising her eyes to look at the snow.
