The Ascent(5)

“I thought you were on crutches now.”

I glanced at the pair of crutches propped in one corner of the room, a ratty old Hawaiian shirt draped over one of the cushioned supports. “Ask some of the neighbors, and they might attest to seeing a man in his late thirties, skin pasty, a bad dresser, stumbling around the lobby on a pair of crutches from time to time. But they’d also no doubt relay the embarrassed and frustrated look on the man’s face.”

“You’re an *, Tim,” Marta said matter-of-factly. Then, some musicality coming to her voice, she said, “I got you a surprise.”

“Oh yeah? What is it, a housekeeper?”

She appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking almost seductive in a pink halter top and a pair of too-short black shorts from which her brown, coltish legs seemed to slide like shafts of daylight. Marta and I were friends and had never dated. Although one night several years ago after spending a few hours getting hammered at a Main Street bar, we’d returned to this very apartment where, midway throughwatching a Coen brothers movie, we’d kissed. The kiss transitioned into clumsy groping, resulting in Marta bare-chested on my sofa, me on top of her with one hand down her pants—which was the exact position we woke up in the next morning. We were mutually humiliated, and I hadn’t kissed her nor seen her breasts since that night.

She crossed the room and tossed a DVD case in my lap.

“Rear Window,” I said. “Hysterical. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’ve got a lousy sense of humor.”

“Did you see the boats?” she said, returning to the kitchen.

“What boats?”

“They’re gearing up for some big race. People from all over the country are in town. You should see the size of the boats down at Ego Alley.”

Ego Alley was what the locals called the downtown dock, where all the silver-haired, retired Annapolis moguls coasted by on their enormous boats, their chests puffed out, while bikini-clad, amber-skinned women decorated the decks. If one were to look closely at these men, it was almost possible to spot a fan of peacock feathers sprouting from their asses.

I piloted my wheelchair back onto the deck, snatching the bottle of Macallan as I went. Sure enough, I could make out a cluster of white sails farther down the shoreline. Uncorking the bottle, I brought the scotch to my lips and took a quick swig. Marta had stopped reprimanding me for drinking while on pain medication, knowing damn well I’d sooner give up the meds than the whiskey. When she caught me now, she would only shake her head like someone who’d just heard of a terrible automobile accident on the news.

It had been six months since the incident at the cave and four months since the last of my surgeries. The result was a steel plate and a dozen or so stainless steel screws drilled into the bones of my left leg. Such things were beyond the assistance of simple pain medication; such things were beyond mere pain.

“Is this a new one?” she called from inside.

I craned my neck to find her standing in the vestibule, holding an envelope.

“Another one from New York?”

“They’re always from New York,” I reminded her.

“You didn’t even open it.”

I took another drink from the bottle and watched a pair of Jet Skis carve white tracks of froth across the surface of the bay.

Marta came up behind me, fanning herself with the envelope. “Can I open it?”

“Be my guest.”

She tore open the envelope, depositing a pigtail curl of white paper into my lap, and read the contents of the letter out loud. She’d gotten only partway when she stopped reading and said without humor, “What’s the matter with you? These guys are making a great offer. They want to fly you out and discuss it. Oh, shit. What’s the date?”

“Don’t really know.”

“Damn it. They wanted you to go out last week. You missed it.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Right,” she said. “Nothing matters. This letter doesn’t matter and neither do any of the others that came before it. There’s a stack of them in a shoe box under your bed, you know.”

“I thought you threw them away.”

“Why would you think that? You never asked what I did with them, and I never told you.”

“Why are you making a big deal about this all of a sudden?”

Marta crinkled the letter into a ball and dropped it in my lap. I could tell, even without peeling apart the ball, that it had been typed on expensive paper. Probably watermarked, with an upraised crest in the header.

“Because it’s been too long,” she said, slipping into the apartment. “Too much time has gone by, and you haven’t done anything to get back on track.”

I turned the wheelchair around and followed her inside. “It was never my intention to get back on that track.”

“Well, you need some track. This place is a dump, and you’re running out of money.”

That much was true. Since the accident, I hadn’t been able to teach at the college. I’d attempted to provide students with an online seminar for the semester—something I could teach via the Internet and a digital camera three nights a week—but I was not a very good lecturer. And it was next to impossible to teach an art class over the Internet. Fortunately I was able to take a sabbatical while I recuperated, and I’d spent the past six months watching DVDs and in the evenings crutching from bar to bar through downtown Annapolis.