“You did?” I couldn’t imagine it.
“You’re very beautiful, cricket, and by that I don’t just mean you’re pretty, which you are. You have a real beauty that shows up on the screen. Pow. I found you mesmerizing. I find you mesmerizing.” He was pressing me closer now, holding on to me like a raft. I was holding him up.
“We’re going to go back and sit on the couch,” he said in that same low voice used by every inhabitant of the room who wasn’t screaming. “In two minutes you’ll get up and go to the bathroom and I’ll stay where I am. We get checked off every fifteen minutes. It’s almost time. Once I get checked off I’ll come and meet you there.”
I looked at him in horror but he ignored it. Clearly it was an emotion whose expression had lost its impact in this place.
He squeezed my arm gently. “Do this for me.” There was so much need in his voice. Then he went back into the den. I suppose I could have gone back to the glass door and banged on it with my fists until someone came to let me out, but instead I went to the bathroom and took off my tights. I thought about that first day when he said he was going to show me the lake, and then I walked into the lake and I swam, farther and farther away, until I couldn’t hear anyone anymore.
I stood with my back to the sink, to the mirror. There was no condom dispenser in the bathroom. I’d bet there never are in these places. For this event I relied on the birth control favored by all women in such circumstances: luck. It works maybe half the time.
Duke came into the bathroom a minute later and lifted me up on the sink. He was facing the mirror. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. He was looking at himself. “Not exactly ladies’ night,” he said once he had finished. He kissed the top of my head and then hustled back to make his next fifteen--minute check off. I straightened myself up as best I could, then found a woman with a clipboard to let me out of the building.
The light had shifted while I was inside and I was trying to get my bearings, trying to make a space in my mind for bus schedules while my mind kept wandering back to Duke trying to make a list of who he could call who might come to New England on a cold autumn night and fuck him in the unlocked bathroom of a locked ward. Pallace? What a preposterous thought. Chelsea? I didn’t know her, but why would she come if there were already lawyers involved? So many actresses and makeup artists and wardrobe mistresses to choose from, so many fans, and still, I was the only person he could absolutely count on.
My hands were shaking and I thought it was from the cold so I dug through my bag to find my mittens. A spectacular orange light reflected off the windows of the building in front of me that made the glass look like beaten sheets of copper. A man in coveralls was raking leaves while another man bagged them up and put them on the back of a John Deere Gator nearby. I wanted to go and open up every bag and dump them out because didn’t they know the leaves were the nice part? I stood there, taking in the sharp air and waiting until the feeling passed so I could walk by them without speaking. Another man sat on a park bench on the other side of the open lawn and watched me watch them. Maybe he had special privileges. Then he stood and I remember thinking how tall he was.
“Lara?” he said.
There were two ways to go: I could have run or I could have cut a straight path towards him, straight into his arms. I was crying when I walked into his arms.
Sebastian was on the visitors’ list but I got there first and a patient could have only one visitor at a time. The night was cold and clear but he had a warm coat. The traffic had been bad driving from Boston where he was staying for the month, and so he decided just to sit and wait, see who came out. Sebastian visited his brother every day.
“Do you want to go in?” We were sitting in his rental car in the parking lot. “I can wait.” That wasn’t true, I couldn’t wait, but I could leave while he was inside and that might be the best thing anyway. I had stopped crying and I was trying very hard to keep it together.
Sebastian shook his head. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
I was starving. He drove quite a way, out of the small town the hospital was in and into the small town beyond it, like we were scraping the whole thing off our shoes. When we walked into the restaurant an old man with a white short--sleeved shirt and black tie smiled to see us. He took two menus from the rack and led us into the dim room. “I’ve got a nice booth in the back,” he said. “All the young lovers want a booth in the back.”
Sebastian’s hand was on my shoulder and he took it away. We laughed like a couple of lunatics but we were glad for the booth, glad for the privacy, glad most of all to be together in some Italian restaurant in a town I didn’t know the name of.
“Here’s to drinking.” He raised his glass of wine to me. The old man had been quick with the wine. He brought it without our asking.
“To drinking,” I said, and touched my glass to his. I was desperate for a drink.
“There’s something about the place. I seem to sponge up everyone’s desire for alcohol and carry it with me out the door.”
I drank down half of what I had and let the warmth spread through me. I had never been so cold, not even in New Hampshire. Sebastian refilled my glass.
“The list of things I feel like I can’t ask you,” I said, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Let’s see how far I can get without you asking then. I never went back to Tom Lake. I didn’t see Pallace again, never heard from her. Duke and Pallace, I don’t know how long that lasted. I know that when Duke went to Hollywood on a ticket your friend Ripley paid for she didn’t go along. Once Rampart caught on, Duke started getting in over his head. He was going on ride--alongs with real cops at night and he kept making friends with the guys in the back of the car, the criminals. Duke wanted me to come see him but I was teaching and I was still . . .” He stopped. “It’s very hard to put a word to it. Duke’s my brother and I love him. You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn’t.” He looked at the menu because he couldn’t look at me anymore. I believed that he was my true friend.
“Eggplant parmesan,” I said.
He nodded. “It’s good.”
“How do you know it’s good?”
“This is my place. Whenever we go to a new town I find a place.”
Wood paneling halfway up the wall, black and white photographs of Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro and Jimmy Durante. His place. “Do you miss teaching?”
He didn’t answer the question. The little candle in a bumpy red glass globe burned between us. “You know what I think about all the time?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.” He picked up a book of matches and tapped it on the table. “I was an hour on the road going home before I even thought about you sitting there, waiting for me to take you back up the stairs.”