Cardinal Numbers: Stories Read online

  “When I can steal a moment in the evening, I go to the rotunda, up in the dome. That was the operating theater a hundred years ago, and it saw some great medical advances. I stand there in silence, watching the moonlight, and I feel I’m in touch with a beautiful essence.” He smiled. “You might like to join me some evening.”

  She gestured illegibly, groaned, pushed past him.

  The new surgeon sucked at his cold pipe. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he said.

  She went into the empty chapel and knelt to pray. Saint Dymphna looked on from a deep sconce. The martyrdom of Saint Ignatius glowed red and blue in the cusped arch window. She asked mercy for those lingering victims of the bus depot fire. She asked for clarity in her heart.

  She went down in the elevator, past X-ray rooms, the pathology lab, under a geometry of asbestos-covered pipe, through the cool connecting tunnel, up gray linoleum steps to her room in the back of the dorm. Next to a buzzing fan, Mona was soaking her feet in a basin of ice water. Mona worked night shift; she was still in her pajamas.

  “Hi, sleepyhead. Doing all right?”

  “I’m trying to think, like an Eskimo.”

  Mona was tiny and dark, with brown eyes under black bangs. Her people farmed a hundred fifty acres of barley and russet potatoes in Bluefield, Minnesota.

  “You could fry an egg on the sidewalk out there.”

  “And I’m in ER. It’s going to be stab wounds and psychos all night long.”

  She looked down into rippling water. “Why don’t you let me freshen your polish?”

  Mona said, “That would be fine.”

  She knelt and separated Mona’s toes, wedging them open with cotton balls. She went at it slowly, precisely, sweat burning in her eyes. The polish, called Summer Cerise, beaded thickly at the end of the brush.

  MRS. RADCLIFFE was dictating again, a shopping list this time.

  “Tenderloin only. I want a well-marbled cut.”

  These incoherent moods: The old woman had snuffled and cooed while having her hair put in braids, and now she was cold and peremptory. Caprice. It could be the name of a houseboat.

  “And make it white turnips, not yellow.”

  The old woman’s tics went in their wonted series. Her hands trembled over satin robe lapels.

  “They keep specially in stock for me a certain tea blend. Griffin’s Limeflower.”

  She came out of the bright dizzy bedroom and into the hall, where it was dusk. The runner was spongy underfoot, its figures sinking away in brown wear. She went still in the front room before the wall of shelved books, their spines a vague medley. Only the ticking of the mantel clock was distinct. She turned on the lights and wrote in the chart:

  “6PM—Medications administered; patient resting comfortably.”

  DISMISSED from the hospital, she went on to Ransome Hall, a brick keep under iron-ore mountains at the far side of town. Wealthy neurasthenics went to Harbor Springs or to Bois Blanc Island, while the rest came here: firebugs, cataleptics, pederasts. She worked long hours on the lockdown ward, and wasn’t afraid to be by herself. Behind barred windows, she was free from niceties and rules (“No jewelry is to be worn while on duty”). There was only the rule of law, of the hammerlock and the leather restraint. She was glad to show strength instead of endurance. And when strength ran out, there was time to dream.

  It was easy—they trusted her with all the keys. Light was low in the storeroom. She snapped the glass neck of the ampoule, drew its full contents up into the syringe, lifted her skirt, punctured a thigh. Brighter light fell on drifts of white flannel blanket. Poultice pans had sheen. Rubber ice caps and rubber sheets seemed slowly to breathe. Her skin was cream with a waft of vanilla.

  ON her day off she went to the movies. There was a very sad story about adoption, a silly musical to fill out the bill, and a newsreel in between. While women around her cried at the feature, she sucked on root beer barrels and thought how the faces up there were no more false or true than those she remembered with wens, warts, goiters, or masked behind gauze. And then, during Movietone footage of the Miss Citrus contest, she was the only one laughing. Afterwards, she went to a tearoom for barley soup and sweet rolls. From the drugstore by the trolley stop, she bought magazines to take home. A back-cover layout announced that the latest achievement in typewriters made for writing perfection with silence. “Allows clear thinking, reduces fatigue, improves accuracy.” She thought of pretty pool typists chatting together, window-shopping, and wondered if there really was any such thing as a “normal” job. Had she been missing out? Her eyes were reflected in the trolley car window, just above the condensation of her breath. She opened to a full-length novelette by someone named Anne P. Radcliffe.

  “She’s a lovely corpse,” said the intern. Looking at the crushed girl, he knew she wasn’t just another hit-and-run. He was wheeling this ambulance on the trail of murder!

  AFTER the asylum was sold for a tax judgment, she went on to Highcroft Academy, a boarding school for girls wanting individual remediation. With field hockey, tennis, riding, came sprains and contusions for treatment; there were viruses and allergies, the menorrheal, the homesick, the hysterical. The campus was large, thickly wooded, and walking out with her sweet-grass basket to gather mushrooms, she sometimes found girls necking or smoking and once, a tramp asleep in fallen leaves. Her reticence in these matters led to respect and the receipt of confidences—the ostracized girl, daughter of missionaries; the girl who stole food; the girl seduced by her grandfather; and finally the would-be suicide, her lips blue with bichloride of mercury, who sobbed, “You’re the only one who cares about me, and I don’t even know your first name.” She could recognize that love came like gas from a hard rubber mouthpiece.

  RID of pride, she went to the agency with a new haircut, her face rubbed plain, her hands dry and smelling of white soap.

  “I want a terminal case,” she said.

  Miss Barton rearranged papers on her desk, frowning. “We’re not here for your accommodation.”

  “I would wait until something was available.”

  She had walked all the way here, crunching rock salt on the downtown pavements. She had purpose that was no dream, though she saw it over and over in her mind.

  Miss Barton pressed her thumb into a gum eraser. “Do you mind living in?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Ever worked with a pediatric iron lung before?”

  “Once or twice.”

  In her sleep she had peeled the last rules away, and woke up clean. She had foreign aromas like summer cabin wood, gardenia jelly, and words brittle in her mouth as a thermometer.

  “Don’t be too sure of yourself,” Miss Barton said.

  SHE stares through mullioned windows at the running lights of a barge. Dogs flee from a bucket of water. Spinning newspapers come to rest, and sigh. It isn’t early; it isn’t late. She hears the small shy coughing and turns back into the room.

  CYCLING POSTURE

  RILEY EATS OUT ALL the time because it is less sad. She moved out on him in December; plane trees now are tipped with early April green, but sweeping, matching socks, heating stew—these things are still sad for him. Normally, he has dinner at La Campaña d’Oro. They serve a beer called El Señor Presidente. Sad maybe, lonesome, but he doesn’t flaunt it with a book propped against the napkin holder. He reads the menu (Chinese on one side and Cuban on the other), always gives the same order: ropa vieja, black beans, yellow rice.

  And at this she would show her fine exasperation. “Don’t you have any curiosity?” And Riley would say that yes, he did; that it was about the two Campaña families running from Mao in ’51, from Castro in ’62. And he supposes now that routines were what pushed her away.

  RILEY bicycles to work because it makes him feel quick and bold and slightly European. Six miles down, six miles back. His calves are spectacular. Normally, he keeps the bike right next to his desk. Moretti doesn’t complain any more.

  Gravity Media p
ublishes three monthlies (Our True Lives, Terror/Counterterror, Global Detective), a bimonthly (Cat Fighters: The Journal of Female Combat), and whenever possible, one-shots like Amazing Pet Stories Annual, or Cudgo Bros. Tour Scrapbook. Moretti, as executive president, must hustle. He has a full-time staff of only five and a distributor who can’t seem to penetrate the national convenience stores. He says acts of contrition all day and drinks milk in defense of his stomach.

  Riley writes everything, even captions. He writes great quantities quickly and easily; his sound is never wrong. Everyone in the office marvels. But really it is nothing special, a trick rather than a gift, a type of accidental serenity. His lacks make it possible: a lack of ambition, a lack of taste, and—he must admit—a lack of curiosity; that is to say, of a curiosity immediately engaged. He operates always at several removes, straggling, aimed elsewhere. This is fine. All under the city there is furious burrowing: cabbies just short of a doctorate, waitresses studying with Merce Cunningham. Riley is grateful to be spared.

  Today, for OTL, before even removing his parka, he does “I Joined an Abortion Club” and “My Daughter Is Trying to Kill Me.”

  ACCORDING to his only source, her niece, a sous-chef, she’s gone to look after her Connecticut grandfather. Will her name and the town’s be enough on the envelope? He fills three pages, but it’s a letter to someone else. He looks at the perforations of a stamp and wonders how they are made.

  Watching Million Dollar Movie is sad also. How she would fill in dialogue of her own, hang on the most obvious plots. Her lips pulled back in concentration, like safety padding over crooked teeth. He gets up to look for the nail clipper, orders himself back down. To make this into the pathos that comes quickly and easily, he tries to think what her grandfather is thinking.

  The bedroom is an oblong perpendicular to the hall. A single window, off center, overlooks the street. From this height it is barely possible to read an address painted on a trash can. A mirror is the oldest thing in the room, its silvering eaten away at two corners. Under the bed, in a chronology of blue, yellow, white, are hardened knobs of Kleenex. The clock face glows in the dark.

  RILEY studies while riding. The texts of cycling posture: racers sleek and low over their handlebars veer in and out of the traffic pack; casuals pedal with arms folded, rock to bunge-corded radios; dutifuls stiff-armed and high in the saddle badge themselves with filtration masks, crash helmets. Riley, though, is a neutral, his three-speed unfashionably thick, his text pared to one word: conveyance. Passing over the invariable route—down Ninth Avenue, east on Fourteenth Street, the bins of cook pots and rubber sandals already pawed through, south again on Broadway—he holds in mental foreground his image of the wheeling masses of Beijing.

  Moretti snaps pencils; he pleads and paces. T/C has to be at the typesetter’s by three, and Riley has just now begun the feature. “PLO Using Mind Control.” Riley abandons his lead, rolls in a fresh sheet. Moretti groans. Mrs. Vega, the Subscription Department, goes downstairs for more milk.

  Lina comes out of the file room, biting her lip.

  Riley glances. “How recently were they used?”

  “Three issues ago. But I can crop differently.”

  With the Pratt students who come in to do paste-up, Lina is the Art Department.

  “This one—the hands out—I thought might go as a psychic trance.”

  Lina is so dark: her eyes, hair, skin, a round depth to her voice. She is very small, very serious. She wears plain black clothes. Her people are Calabrese.

  “I don’t know. He looks ill.”

  Lina and Riley would sleep together, but thinking about it, they agree, is better. The work abets. Editing, doing captions at opposite ends of a desk, they are thinking about it all the time.

  “No panic. I’ll look some more.”

  And Lina adores her husband, who is shy because of his faulty English, blind in one eye and retired from boxing.

  Riley finishes just before two and goes for lunch. Wendell, the Advertising Department, takes him for pastrami, then talks too much to eat. The great Park Row press wars. The scoops, hoaxes, flash bars.

  “See? It was right out there.”

  Wendell points to the corner cut-rate luggage store. Probably it had once been a saloon; possibly an editor had been shot in the doorway over a love nest scandal. But Wendell lives with his mother and romances a time before he was born. He is as hopeful as anyone wanting to add bustline inches, to lose weight while sleeping. Transformation is real to him. Instant $$$—song poems wanted. Sharpen saws at home—be your own boss.

  Riley says, “I bet there isn’t a thing you’d rather be doing.”

  Wendell grins, tips heavily.

  Too many coffees at La Campaña. The caffeine, the glucose … Riley’s problem is not his inability to sleep but the lack of a routine to meet the situation. He tries crossword puzzles, a hot bath. The muscle strips along his spine are cramping and he cannot distract himself. “Scared” is the wrong word, but he wishes the phone would ring.

  HE signs in, and the guard, without shifting his eyes from Muhammad Speaks, runs him up in the cage. There are brass fixtures in the Starrett Building someone still takes time to polish. Riley believes in the marble, that it isn’t something else finished to look like marble. He goes up two flights, down the long shadow of a hall, turning, as if on a dance floor, to face each frosted pane, bowing. Mail Exchange. School of Fashion. Loan Broker. Patent Attorney. To punch out the glass to see what’s inside. So Riley feels his curiosity engaged and does not like it.

  He keys both locks of the Gravity office, waters the plant, feeds Mrs. Vega’s angelfish, makes soup from a packet. It is still dark outside, untinged. He goes to the farthest room back, sits under bright lights, against bundles of Air Disaster!, a “Collector’s Item” on coated paper, and blows ripples in the soup.

  Breathless and overgroomed, Moretti arrives at eight-thirty, takes a few minutes to be surprised.

  “You’re not supposed to be in. And where’s that bike?”

  His face is at once pallid and aggressive; he might be wearing Kabuki makeup. “You’re the cog, Riley, so we keep turning. Stand still in this business, you know …”

  Moretti has been in sportswear, outdoor advertising, an adult motel. Now finally, with the magazines, he is making a go. Perhaps this does not agree with him.

  Lina is so tiny she has to buy schoolgirl sizes, like this sappy pleated skirt. But she is so grave in it. Lina sits on the edge of her desk, where Riley has been typing since dawn.

  “Early,” she says.

  Riley looks down. Her feet barely reach the handle of the middle drawer. She is wearing Mary Janes.

  “I needed some extra time for thinking.”

  Lina smiles, touches his first page of copy, “Nebraska’s Pantyhose Strangler,” smiles, nods.

  A LITTLE after ten, Riley collapses onto the sofa Wendell brought up from the street and crammed into his office. Hopeful Wendell. He is on the phone trying to land a major for OTL. They are coming out with a line of feminine towelettes. And neuroelectric fatigue twitches for Riley, fragments of “Gay Bikers’ Homicide Cookout” that he hasn’t written yet, and stickpin revival (Wendell’s bulging Park Row vests) without the scars from molten lead for type, and seeing Angelina, old and dried under her full name, blinking through Catanzaro street dust, sucking Fanta orange from a cup. This is Riley’s quality of mind when working, elaborative; and true, he controls in part, moving here to there like a photo stylist. But distance is lost, his removes collapsed and overrun. Awful, this layered weight on him, like something made up and come round, revenge of his written victims giving back what he’d stuck them with. He turns away from clatter, Wendell’s tricked face, into the cushions. “Scared” is now the word, even as he falls asleep.

  Riley arrives at his decision prismatically, that is to say by a kind of bending. Bicycling to Connecticut to see her is not a sound idea. But once he has formed it, he must complete it, in order to
avoid in the future looking back on the torpor and cowardice of a failure to carry through. Regret—no, thank you. Regret is why people read what he writes.

  Things to take: map, tools, food and drink, fresh shirt. But Riley just carries his bike downstairs and begins. Excellent. This is the spontaneous thing to do. Pedaling steadily through the night, he should arrive Saturday morning, not so early and not so late. Perfect.

  She will have to let him stay, out of respect for the gesture. He will be cool and mysterious, only hint at his pain. Perhaps she will have a few admissions to make. There will be daffodils. Kneeling to cut some, she will turn her head, smile crookedly into the sun, and his hand under her chin, lifting … It will be like nothing he could write.

  Turning onto Route 33 at Wilton, Riley is very tired. His memory reaches doubt: A dozen pages short on CF, out of time. And when Riley asked, okay. She and her niece stripped to their underwear, took to the floor in genre grapple poses, hair-pulling, all of it. He shot three rolls of black-and-white (ASA 200) with a borrowed Minolta. And Moretti said, “Man, great stuff. I mean these girls really hate each other.”

  What had Riley missed?

  He walks the bike now, counting down the even numbers of Beadle Street. Green gutters and trim, the man at the Texaco said. Not a very big town, his mental picture ludicrous against it. No stately spaces here. Everything is shoved down. The daffodils are plastic.

  “Why?” she says, and again, quietly, “why?”

  But she steps back from the door to let him in.

  “I biked all the way.”

  Why had he thought it would sound impressive?

  “It’s all right,” she says, seeing how he peers. “They came from the Center to take him for a ride.”

  Won’t she go change out of her pajamas, or put coffee on? Riley can’t look at her, instead substitutes the painting of JFK and John XXIII against fleecy clouds, Jordan almonds in a shell dish. He smooths his hands together.

  “Honest to God, Riley, you seem right at home. So what’re you doing here?”