“No.”
“Where do you think she is right now? Praying I'll let you go? Is she the one you keep calling?”
Three discreet knocks on the side of the open door announced the arrival of another gang of medical personnel, an attendant after blood, a nurse to pull out Gretchen's IV, a helper to knock around the dinner tray. They marched in and out of the room, as strict as army troops on maneuvers.
Gretchen pushed hard on the cotton they left behind on her hand where the IV had entered. “It hurts,” she said. She started to cry. Craig stood up, put a hand on her shoulder, and held on while she shook.
A sudden commotion escalated the echoing in the hallway. Several people burst into the room, boisterous as a theater troupe leaping onstage for a bow. The lights blasted on, and the softness of the moment was destroyed by the details, the look on Craig's face, so put-upon. The wrinkled sheets, all balled up at the foot of her bed. The huge white bandages on her left leg. Gretchen stopped crying and Craig left her side. A young girl, black-haired, pierced with metal loops from her eyebrow right down to her sandaled toes, pushed the blue curtain aside, came over to the bed, and looked sympathetically at Gretchen.
“I'm guessing I'm your roommate. Katie. What happened to you?” she said, her eyes brushing over Craig to Gretchen and back again.
“I broke my leg.”
“Ouch,” she said. “How'd you do it?”
“Dancing.”
“Really? Well, that's almost cool.”
“What about you?” Gretchen asked.
“I have an abscess on my boob.” She disappeared behind the curtain. A woman with short, wispy, gray-blonde hair smiled apologetically. She wore pink lipstick, and a matching sleeveless blouse that showed loose skin under the arms. “Can I have your extra chair?” she asked.
Craig nodded. The woman, Katie's mother, possibly, pulled the chair to the foot of the other bed. Katie's skin was brown, the woman's was stark, glaring white. A big, dark, bearded man with a British accent filled up another chair.
Gretchen pulled the curtain so that only the lower part of her body remained exposed and she could not see her neighbor's head, although she could see most of the bed and the rest of the room. Craig, sitting toward the foot of her bed again, could see almost everything, although the curtain provided a psychological shield. Everyone acted as if they were in entirely separate realms.
A discussion started up on the other side of the room. With help, the girl climbed on the bed and promptly started to whine. “I'm so hungry,” she said. “Why can't I eat something? Mother, have you got anything I can eat?”
“I'm so sorry, honey, but you have to wait,” her mother said. “They won't let me feed you.”
“They'll give you anesthesia before the… they fix things up,” said the Brit. “They don't want you tossing up food in there.”
“Why did this have to happen?” the girl asked. She slurped water noisily. “This hurts, you know. I feel like utter crap. I might as well be dead.”
The Brit winced and reached out a hand to her. “Don't drink too much. They said not to.”
“Oh, honey,” the girl's mother murmured. “They'll take care of you soon.” She crawled up onto the bed beside her daughter. “Daddy and I will make sure they do.”
But the whining intensified into pained bleating, and no one came. After a while, the dad left to find someone, ostensibly to demand an explanation for the delay, but Gretchen and Craig knew why. Her surgery was unscheduled, not an emergency. She had to wait her turn. Daddy just had to do something. He couldn't bear to see his girl suffer.
Gretchen's eyes filled. She spoke softly to Craig so that no one else could hear. “I want you to tell me… I need to know. What happened to change my life so I can't recognize it anymore?”
“Gretchen,” Craig's voice was so low she could barely hear it, “I consider the matter settled. This isn't a negotiation. It's just upsetting for both of us and gets us nowhere.”
“I don't recognize myself in this.”
“People change,” he said. “You're hard to live with. Up, down, all over the place. Mad for no reason. Jumping out of your skin and all over me. I never know what you might do next. I feel ungrounded. I just want a happy life. Peace.”
“Did the feeling just… shift, like a dog jumping over to another lap? Did you tell her she's irresistible to you, like you did me?”
“Hush, now.” He pulled the sheet down. “Get up, Gretchen. Let's get going.”
“Did you think, oh, here's someone prettier than Gretchen, someone who will hold me in high esteem. Someone who won't nag me to work harder or slob around in an untidy house without lifting a finger to pick up.”
“Please put your clothes on.”
“How can you love someone and then not love them?” she asked. “I don't believe it's possible.”
Craig opened the brown sack, pulling out a blouse. He untied the threadbare blue print hospital gown that encased Gretchen and tried to pull it up over her head. She resisted, arms down at her sides, steely.
“You can't just stop loving.”
“Come on,” he said. “Come on.” When she continued to resist, he dropped his arms to his sides. He put one in his pocket.
“You wish it would ring, don't you? There's a woman out there, you're thinking. She'll welcome me without any pressure. But what I want to tell you, Craig, is that that's a temporary state in a relationship. It's after six months that matters, when you see the man's pores, and dirty underwear on the floor, when you notice he never flosses… I love you, defects and all. I love when you make a racket blowing your nose, and when you fret about the newspaper being late, and when you criticize me, then say it's because you care so much.”
The girl in the next bed whimpered, then moaned. Her cries were muffled, presumably by the arms of her mother.
“I decided”-Gretchen pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them-“that she must be hotter in bed, something along those lines. So last week I conducted some scientific tests. Remember, by the window? And then at the beach that Thursday morning. So early, fog everywhere… I may not have proved anything to you, but I proved a few things to myself. You're older, and you hate getting older. I mean, forty isn't so old, even though you feel it is. But there's such a thing as being graceful, you know. We could be graceful together.”
“Don't do this,” Craig said.
“Like during the dance, I felt happy with your arms around me, the love I felt for you right at that moment. I felt like it didn't matter that I'm not a perfect person. I felt accepted, for just a moment. Then… you chose a bad time to tell me, admit that. You're slightly guilty in that respect, too.”
“I never said a word!”
“You were going to. It felt like a truck crossing the centerline, coming at me.”
“You were drunk, just like you were the night before, you know, when you went to stay at your mom's. You were mad for days before I even said a word. Don't tell me you blame this situation on me.”
“Of course I do. I wish you would say you were sorry for everything.”
“If I say I'm sorry, will you get up?” He picked up her clothes, then set them down on the bed again. “And put on these god-awful clothes you brought?”
“No.”
“I'm just trying to… it wouldn't be respectful of me not to tell you, would it, Gretch? To live a big lie?”
“You show your respect for me by cheating?”
“Is it cheating if I tell you about it? We aren't even sleeping together yet.”
“Yet you want to move in with her.”
“Everything's in the car, ready to go. Now you know it all.”
“You plan to sleep with her tonight, if all goes well here. You expect to find her sitting by the fire, combing her neat hair, wearing the kind of negligee you like, something frothy and girly. She'll jump up, arms raised to hold you… It's a charming fantasy. I can't compete. I drink too much, I have no fashion sense, and at the moment, I can't even reach you to hug you without using a crutch.”
“I don't want to hurt you. You're hurting yourself.”
“Not true. You want honesty? I stumbled at the dance. I felt faint when I realized the moment had come and you wanted to end things. I simply fell. I didn't try to evade the truth. Although I was afraid, yes.”
“Tell me you'll be graceful now, Gretchen.”
“You want it easy.”
“Tell me we can get beyond this.”
“To a divorce? The house is mine. Where will you live? In some dingy, little apartment in a bad neighborhood?”
He looked startled. She had scored. “Let's not get into that. The lawyers will work things out so that they are fair.”
“Did you tell her about the back taxes we owe?”
“I refuse to talk about this. That's business. Right now is personal.”
“Okay, it's personal. You want to leave me for a younger blonde with black roots and a quiet voice.”
“How do you know all that?”
“No great detective work involved there. She's blonde with roots because you like blondes, and I'm blonde and no woman over twenty is a natural blonde. She's quiet, the better to listen to her hero. No doubt she drinks too much, too, or sings too loud like I do? She fancies herself in control, but sometimes she does outrageous, unbelievable things? She has to do something obnoxious.”
“No, she doesn't.”
Gretchen threw her magazine on the floor. “I really don't want to know about her and her delicate sensibilities!”
A drawn-out wail from behind the plastic curtain split her sentence in half.
“This isn't the place,” Craig said.
“It's the only place. After tonight, you won't see me. You'll be busy with her.”
“Please, Gretch, let's get going.” He punched the cell phone again. Again, there was no answer. He stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, one eye on the window. “Where's that damn nurse?” He checked the clock on the wall.
The Brit returned, successful, with a resident in tow. He sat back down in his chair in front of the sink. The mother removed herself from the bed. The tall, thin doctor, black bags big as old- fashioned doctor satchels pouched under his eyes, leaned momentarily against the wall for support, then moved toward the bed. “Where does it hurt?” he asked.
“It freaking hurts there, and there! It hurts all the way underneath!” she said. “I went to this clinic last week? And they gave me painkillers, that's it! Can you believe it? And now I end up here!”
“When did the pain get really bad?”
“Two days ago.”
“And when did you originally injure yourself?”
