I was glad to leave her room and leave the sound of breathing. Somehow it was like the coma that precedes death. I went down and found a cold beer, turned on the television set with the volume low, and watched twenty-two very large young men knocking one another down while thousands cheered. I watched and yet did not watch. It was merely a busy pattern of color, motion, and sound.
Blue handles of kitchen shears. Helena climbing naked in the red light of the Exuma sun, rising to teeter on the rail, then find her balance, then dive into the black-gray water of the cove at Shroud Cay and then surface, seal-sleek, hair water-pasted flat to the delicate skull contours. Penny Woertz snuggling against me in the night, her back and shoulders moist with exertion, making little umming sounds of content as her breath was slowing. Biddy sobbing aloud as she trotted into my bathroom, her running a humble, awkward, clumsy, bovine, knock-kneed gait. Memory and digital skills. The bleeders don’t jump, and the hangers don’t bleed. Twenty thousand to a tall man. Jake saying “Bon voyage.” The `Bama Gal erupting into the sunlight after all the weeks on the murky bottom. Tom Pike lifting his face from his hands, eyes streaming. Mick thumping the cabin trim with a solid fist as he showed me the honest way the Likely Lady had been built. Substantial means more than comfortable and less than impressive. Maurie streaking greasy fingers across the rounded, pneumatic, porcelain-gold of her thigh. Rick Holton flexing and rubbing his wrists after I’d unwound the tight bite of the hanger wire. Blue handles of kitchen shears. Penny’s clovery scents. Five dozen silk ties with good labels. Orange light winking. An umber-orange mole, not as big as a dime. Huddled nude in a Gauguin jungle.
The mind is a cauldron and things bubble up and show for a moment, then slip back into the brew. You can’t reach down and find anything by touch. You wait for some order, some relationship in the order in which they appear. Then yell Eureka! and believe that it was a process of cold, pure logic.
Finally, on my fourth visit to the electrosleep bedside, it was exactly six o’clock, so I gently removed the headset, put it aside, and turned the Dormed off. I watched her, ready to go awaken Biddy if Maureen woke up. For several minutes she did not move. Then she rolled her head over to one side, made a murmurous sound, then rolled all the way over onto her side, pulled her knees up, put her two hands, palms together, under her cheek, and soon was breathing as deeply as before.
As the room got darker I turned on a low lamp on the other side of the room. I sat in a Boston rocker near the bed, watching the sleeping woman and thinking that this was probably where Biddy sat and watched her, while she thought about the marriage and thought about her own life.
At a little after eight I knocked on Biddy’s door. After the second attempt I heard a groggy, querulous mutter. I waited and knocked again and suddenly she pulled the door open. She had a robe around her shoulders and she held it closed with a concealed hand. Her hair was in wild disarray and her face was swollen with sleep. “What time is it!”
I told her it was a little after eight, that I had unhooked Maurie from her machine at six, and that she was still sleeping. She yawned and combed her hair back with her free hand. “The poor thing must have been really exhausted. I won’t be a minute.”
When she was dressed, she sent me downstairs, saying she’d bring Maurie down in a little while. I found the light switches. As I was making a drink the phone rang. It was just one ring. No more. And so I decided Biddy had probably answered it upstairs. As I was carrying my drink into the living room it rang again, and once again it was just one ring.
Soon they came down. Maurie wore a navy blue floor-length robe with long sleeves and white buttons and white trim. She was scratching her shoulder with one hand and the opposite hip with the other, and complaining in a sour little voice. “Just about eaten to pieces. How do they get in with the house all closed up?”