Layover Page 10

  The question was how crazy. The question was how deep into myself I could bear to go. HOLE, SEE ALSO: I was like one of those cave scuba divers without a tank, plunging straight down. How long could I hold my breath, how far could I get from the surface. I was like one of those math problems on the SAT that I used to be so good at, could do so effortlessly—if x is traveling at y speed, and going so far, how long will it take them to reach wherever.

  But I wasn’t going anywhere if I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t pee, couldn’t shower and dress, check out, get to my rental car.

  If I called Ken, I could say come and get me. I’m sorry but could you please come to Philadelphia and get me. He would not be angry. I am at the Four Seasons. He could come, immediately. Although it was August I saw him wrapping me tenderly in a coat, leading me to the elevator. Saw myself in the safety of our silver Legend, engine running, the leather seats cool against the backs of my legs, waiting for him to take care of the rental car. Heard him talking to the parking attendant in his imperious physician’s voice. No we do not have the ticket, fine charge us the maximum, do I look like I care what you charge me for parking just get on with it.

  But he would fly not drive. But how would I wait for his car, how would I recognize it. Who cared what kind of car he rented at the airport, let it be a Cavalier for all I cared, just get me out of here. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to return the other rental car to the airport. Let Enterprise figure out what was missing and come and fetch it the way they claimed they’d do so joyfully in their TV spots.

  As such I would be lost, for hours at a time, in the logistics of disentangling myself from the hotel.

  Clearly I was not capable of getting to the airport alone.

  However, I was not so far gone that I was going to call Ken in this state. Nor did I imagine, given the way I’d acted for the past two weeks, that Ken should somehow sense I’d changed my mind, know to come as Cary Grant had intuited the moment had arrived though he had been told he was not welcome at Ingrid Bergman’s house. I had asked for space and now I’d gotten it, big time. This is not the Milky Way, I chided myself, this is a hotel room, you have not even left the capsule and even if you did you are wearing your space suit, you have cut no ties.

  What I needed to do was call Dan Kramer.

  Dan Kramer needed to get me a dose of Zoloft or something.

  That might necessitate my getting dressed and leaving the hotel room to pick up the prescription, but maybe not. Maybe the Four Seasons had people to run errands.

  I saw the ancient bellboy at my door. I would have to get dressed and answer. I would have to find my purse, calculate a tip. If they would even bring me room service, before I had settled up with the Desk. If I had to do all that I might as well pick up the prescription myself.

  Thus I would get exhausted again.

  This went on for two-and-a-half days. Then I sat up and called Kramer.

  “Are you able to eat?” Dr. Kramer asked.

  I called him at ten of the hour, when he was between patients. He actually picked up on the first ring, and I explained to him that I needed his help since I was suffering some failure of will, some kind of temporary paralysis, in a hotel in a city where I didn’t live, and needed a small amount of the appropriate drug that would get me home.

  “Well, I was eating.”

  “So your appetite is normal.”

  “It was. Then I threw up.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “The food was just too rich. World-famous French place. Plus I’d been drinking.”

  “How much?”

  I sighed. I guess he had to go through all this. “A small amount of white wine.” Eating? Come to think of it, I was getting hungry. (Best not to even start thinking about room-service menus, calls to room service.) It had been, maybe, almost three days. My eye went to the still-locked mini-bar. Honey-roasted peanuts? Probably not a good idea.

  “Claire? Are you sleeping at all? Are you able to sleep?”

  “It’s one of those not-quite-sleep sleeps. Sort of—hypnagogic. But yes, I guess. Not that I feel particularly rested but who would, under the circumstances.”

  “Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”

  “Of course not,” I said crossly. “Not exactly thinking about it but I rather am, don’t you think?”

  “You are not, I assume, able to work from there? You’ve suspended your appointments?”

  I exhaled loudly and squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to visualize the thirty-one unreturned phone calls as thirty-one crooked tombstones in snow. More calls now. Many more now. I didn’t respond. Somewhat cruel of him, I thought, to bring this up. When I opened my eyes I noticed that the message light on the phone was doing its spastic dance: how had I managed to dial Kramer without noticing this? How had I managed to dial Kramer at all?

  “Claire, do you think you want to call your office, say you are seriously under the weather, just to take the heat off?”

  “Yes. But can’t.”

  “Or have me do it, if it’d be easier, as your physician, unless you feel that would alarm them? Maybe Ken would be better—”

  “No, you. Say flu. Thank you.”

  “Have you called Ken?”

  “No. I was kind of waiting for him to bust down the door here, on a horse.”

  “You did tell him to lay off.”

  “Be kind of hard to get a horse in the hotel elevator anyhow.”

  “I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor. That’s good.”

  “Actually I’m not joking. I’m literally seeing him on the horse, charging into the lobby. White horse, white lab coat. Horse’s mane aflowing.”

  Ken pushed his glasses up on his nose, which sort of ruined the picture. I didn’t say this out loud, I guess. Also didn’t mention that the horse was—well, hard.

  “Another symptom I should maybe mention to you. I’m just—I’m horny.”

  “How so.”

  “How so? In the normal way, except more of it. I’ve been masturbating a lot, wanting to even more. Also I seduced this eighteen-year-old boy I met at the hotel swimming pool. It was strange, but kind of lovely. Then went to dinner with him and his mother and toyed with the idea of having sex with her too. It’s something I’ve never done, sex with a woman.”

  Why was I saying this? It wasn’t even true. I hadn’t considered such a thing at all. But now I got lost in wondering why not.

  “Claire.” He called me back by using my name, it seemed, too insistently, trying to stretch the a out into a steadying caress. “Are your cycles pretty regular?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Your menstrual cycles.”

  “Not very. Why?”

  “The overflow of sexual feelings could be hormonal. Obviously there are lots of psychological reasons we could explore, and the link between sexuality and grief is less unusual than you might think—I assure you, you are hardly a freak—but when were you last at your OB-GYN?”

  “I don’t need a Pap smear, Dan. I need Prozac.”

  “Claire, you know very well I can’t just prescribe medication to you over the phone in the state you’re in. In a different state to boot. What if something went wrong? Getting the right dosage of the right drug is a complicated business. Anyway I’d never prescribe without—listen, could you hold on for one second?”

  I did, while he poked his head out the door to put on hold, I assume, the patient in the lobby.

  “Thanks. Are you still there? Sorry. Where were we? No responsible doctor would prescribe that kind of drug without first eliminating the physical causes. Hormonal. Thyroid.”

  “Plus you aren’t licensed to prescribe, having evaded the rigors of medical school, and you wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to prescribe, would you?”

  He didn’t take the bait. He remained calm. “Claire, if you needed medication I would be the very first to get you to an MD who could work with you. Don’t you recall how eager Ken was to put you in touch with someone? It
was you who chose not to go that route, and I happened to agree with you. You are not depressed. You do not need antidepressants. You are a strong, smart woman who had a very tragic loss which for the most part you’ve handled remarkably well. Then there was this business with Ken and—the business with Ken, but I think the two of you can work that through. The question here seems more to be about the nature of your cry for help. Do you or do you not want Ken to come and get you and take you home? I am fully confident that if you wanted him to, he would do so. You do not have to be committed to a mental hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in order to get that degree of attention from your husband, although I understand that his frustration about your remoteness has been hard for you, especially given the extra difficulties introduced by your schedules, and your anger with your husband is something we’ll want to focus on once you get back here.”

  “I’m not angry at Ken.”

  “I see. You’re not angry. You love your husband and you love men in general. You just want to become a lesbian, right?”

  He said this jovially. Was this the proper tone for him to use to talk to me? I did not reply.

  “Can’t imagine,” he continued, “what problems that’d solve for you, although you must admit it is interesting that you should have that fantasy now. And certainly we should talk about the boy at the pool. There are issues. Obviously. If you honestly believe that you are incapable of checking out of the hotel, getting to the airport, maybe the best thing to do is to call Ken and have him come. Or let me call him. Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Then let’s try to put all your energy into getting back here. What do you think that would take?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Don’t you think that maybe if you took a shower, had something to eat, you’d feel a lot more—centered? Capable?”

  I imagined bacon and eggs. Pancakes. The dumb garnish: a strawberry and melon, like a clown’s nose and smile. The personal pot of coffee, black. The tinny click of the silverware. He was right, surely. But it just felt too hard. My mind was as cluttered and inadequate as the too-small table on which breakfast would be served.

  “Would you mind terribly calling room service for me?” I said.

  “Dan,” I said. “Please. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Then I started to cry.

  He let me. I don’t know for how long. Asked me my room number. What was the phone number there, was it printed on the phone? What did I want to eat. Breakfast stuff, I said. He said gently that he had a patient now but he would have some breakfast sent up to me and did I have any Valium in my travel bag? No? I had taken Valium before, though? Did they tend to calm me down? Yes, I said, chortling now but still sobbing hard, although they also tended to make me incredibly horny. Well we would cross that bridge when we came to it he said but listen, he would investigate whether it was possible to get a couple of Valium to me, just to help me get home.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He told me, very gently, the exact time at which he would call me back. He said he wasn’t sure exactly when he’d be able to get through to whatever physician was on call at the hotel, but he would call me back, in any case, when he was done with his patient.

  “Ring once and hang up,” I said, “so I know it’s you.”

  “Are you expecting someone else?”

  “The desk.” I looked at the blinking phone light. “I’m not supposed to be here, actually. Ken stopped my credit card, believe it or not, so they don’t have an imprint of my new plate. Could you call the front desk? Could you deal with that? Tell them I’m crazy but going as fast as I can?”

  “You’re not crazy. You’re not crazy, Claire. You’re hungry.”

  “What are you, a therapist or a nutritionist?”

  He laughed. “You’re fine,” he said. “Let’s just concentrate on getting you home.”

  Would a Four Seasons valet, greeted by a naked lady, drop the tray or carry on, unperturbed, with the fierce professional grace of a stevedore? “Just put it there, please.” Yes ma’am and where [unzipping his pants] should I put this? Out comes—what you’d expect. Or a bouquet of daisies. Or a large frying pan. The options felt surprisingly circumscribed, depending on what kind of movie you tuned in: Buñuel, the Playboy Channel.

  This is what I thought about, while brushing my teeth. My sense of scale had been damaged. Both the head of the toothbrush and my scummy tongue felt gargantuan, like some kind of rusty scupper scouring the bottom of a river. On the other hand, my entire naked body felt tiny, containable. Cute as a button I thought, because, were I to trill “come on in” and lie down naked to greet the valet, my “private parts” would look so much like the garnish my mind kept anticipating on the breakfast plate: pert pink nipples as eyes, and then, below, the lettuce-ruffle of the nose-bush from which poked, as lone berry, the cherry. Boop-boop-eee-doop: a mouth dainty and succulent as a doll’s.

  I was not delusional (here I found myself taking notes, as if anticipating further questions from Kramer), could still easily distinguish events in the real world—the clatter of the pipes as my neighbor’s toilet flushed; the blinking message indicating the hotel desk and not Castro, the CIA, the Son of Sam—from the boundary-defiance that my brain, spinning off its axis, seemed to be engaging in. I did not really want to greet the valet naked. There was no percentage in getting him or hotel management all riled up.

  While pulling on my shorts, I remembered a lunatic I had seen on a commuter train once, talking to himself in sign language. I don’t speak it, but when he made a doughnut of the thumb and forefinger of one hand and stuck the third finger from the other hand through the doughnut, repeatedly, violently, I understood that he had in mind for someone to go fuck themselves. He saw me watching, glowered, lowered his hands, managed to keep still for a moment, but then his shoulders and neck began to shake as he returned to talking to himself in his lap.

  I was not that far gone. Not off my meds; not, as Kramer reassured me, even a candidate for them.

  Just hungry.

  How hungry I had not realized until the food arrived. I couldn’t wait for the delivery person to leave so I could eat. But he moved very slowly and deliberately.

  He couldn’t really look at me. Couldn’t meet my eyes, was just staring at me chest-level as I thanked him and gathered up his tip. I found this disconcerting enough that I lowered my chin to look down, to see what he was seeing.

  Merely that I was braless in my lightweight T-shirt. No Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue here—the outline of my nipples not even really visible, my breasts just swaying slightly—but enough to throw the young man off balance.

  My Lord, was I going to have to fuck him too (I imagined myself inquiring, dramatically, of Kramer). The whole world, not just me, totally obsessed.

  “Um, someone left something for you,” he said. He bent outside of my room and produced, from the rug, one of the plastic bags the hotel provides in the closet—for laundry presumably, though it would have to be small laundry since it’s exactly the size of an airplane’s barf bag—which someone had written across, in ballpoint pen that snagged on the plastic, FOR CLARE.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Huh?” he said, sticking his head out the door as a maid, down the hall, rattled to him in Spanish. “Oh. Uh. She wants to know when she can clean the room.”

  “Soon. Not now, though.”

  “She wants to know are you checking out or staying.”

  Don’t we all. “Soon.”

  I had to almost push him out the door.

  Didn’t look in the bag right away, because I was too ravenous. A bomb, a million bucks in counterfeit cash, Van Gogh’s ear—it would just have to wait.

  Tore the lid off the food. Cheese omelette, wheat toast, fruit salad. God bless Daniel Kramer, Ph.D. The grape jelly, cheerful in its cozy cabin; the festive paper hat over the glass of orange juice; the stray flop of parsley atop the omelette, sole purpose of which is to need t
o be removed, ceremonially: all of these familiar semaphores induce in me a deep feeling of safety. I freed the cutlery from the straitjacket of the napkin and, almost moaning with appreciation, I snorfed, chipmunked my cheeks full. Then forced myself to rest. To slow down. Butter, cantaloupe, salty egg: all celestial.

  In the bag (sated, I could now investigate), my shitty sandals, and a note from Zachary.

  The sandals looked like something excavated from days of yore that should be in the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, artfully displayed along with the embroidered shoes in which they sacrificed Peruvian girls, the slippers for bound Chinese feet. I needed new sandals. Leaned them against the empty juice glass, though, and propped Zach’s note against them, so I could read it as I continued to eat.

  Dear Clare/ire/[Last name—keep thinking DOGOODER?!??]

  You’ll always be DOCTOR to me.

  Saved yr shoes.

  Thanks for the mammarys

  (bet U dont think thats funny)

  Stop by/Say Hi

  if your ever in R.I.

  X

  XX

  X

  Z.

  Jeez, computer literacy hasn’t done much for normal old-fashioned literacy, I noted, but then I just felt touched. Poured myself some coffee from the silver pot and let my eye linger on the curves of my man-child’s writing. The note began printed, loped into cursive, and had this strange shape, concrete poem or mere sloppiness it was impossible to say. The Xs trailed off in a way that looked like a hoof at the end of a bull’s back-kicking leg. I pictured a satyr, Zach’s head perched atop a beast’s furry bod.

  At furry I spat my first gulp of coffee back in the cup.

  Vile. I opened the pot to see if a dead mouse was curled inside, but it appeared to be unpolluted coffee, steaming. Took a more tentative sip, as repulsive as the last.

  Then mentally gasped: I am pregnant!

  Could not stomach coffee when I was pregnant.