All's Well(18)

So I cobbled together a CV. So I got a few of my old directors to put in a good word for me. All of whom had heard of my accident. All of whom felt sorry for me, lied for me.

You come very highly recommended, the dean said approvingly during my interview.

Do I?

“Theater, right,” Mark says. “You know, my fiancée and I went to see Phantom just the other day. She just loves musicals.”

Of course she does.

“Do you ever do musicals?”

“No. I hate musicals.”

Mark laughs, so good-natured. Obviously, I would hate musicals. Musicals have joy. I am the antithesis of joy. I lie there thinking uncharitable thoughts while Mark scrapes me. About the fiancée. About Mark and the fiancée seeing Phantom. I feel him breathing close beside me. His clinical hand warm on my back. The only kind of hand that has touched me in four years, since Paul and I split. Of course, Paul didn’t touch me much toward the end. Our intimacy had disintegrated from infrequent, wincing sex to me blowing him occasionally, and then, when the drugs and the pain blunted my desire for anything but a hug, to the odd kiss.

I could do something for you? Paul would offer, always. But the endless prodding of PTs and surgeons had made me far too disconnected from my body, which felt medicalized and alien, forever under clinical lights and eyes.

Could you just hug me? I used to ask. Knowing how pathetic and sexless I must have seemed by then. Such a far cry from the creature I was before the fall, when sex and intimacy were as vital to me as air. I couldn’t even look at Paul when I asked. He’d sigh and open his arms. Limply, but not unkindly. And I’d hang on to him like a drowning wretch.

“Little pinch,” Mark says now. And then I feel the dry needle driving into my back. I scream.

“Good job. Good twitch there,” Mark says. “All right. Walk it off a bit.”

He has me walk the length of the gym under his observation, my back and legs pulsating from all Mark has done. I pass other patients in the midst of their exercises, kicking and punching the air with their atrophied limbs. A woman with swollen legs is pedaling a taped-up bike. An older man is attempting to situate himself in the leg-press machine to no avail, making little cries of anguish with every shift of his stiff, veiny limbs. Meanwhile, his therapist, a young, scared-looking girl with a ponytail, watches in wonder.

“And how are we now?” Mark says. He looks so fucking hopeful and triumphant it kills me.

Worse. So much worse. You are breaking me, do you hear me? You are fucking breaking me.

“I still feel it,” I say apologetically.

Mark looks perturbed. Still? Couldn’t be. “All the way down to the foot still?”

I nod.

“But less?”

No. Absolutely not fucking less.

“Maybe less,” I lie, hating myself. Hating Mark.

“You see?” Mark says. “Little victories.”

“I do feel weird though,” I insist uselessly.

Mark says I should continue to do the exercise at home, ten to thirty reps each hour.

“Each hour?”

He shrugs. “Or just whenever you’re feeling like you need it,” Mark says, looking over my shoulder. I feel him detaching himself from my misery, my predicament. No longer his problem.

“Just whenever things get agitated.”

“But things are agitated now,” I say. Because of it.

But his next patient has arrived, I can tell by his eyes, which are looking past me to the waiting room. I turn and see a woman in workout tights waving at him, smiling. She must be new. I can tell by the brightness of her eyes, the palpable quality of her faith. I panic.

“What about my floor workout?” I say, positioning my crooked body between him and his view of the waiting room.

“You can do that, sure.”

“And can I walk?” I always ask this.

“Just listen to your body, Miranda.” Mark always says this. “Let pain be your guide. Remember pain is information. Use heat if you like.”

“Heat? How often, how long?” I hear the desperation in my voice. A remedy!

“Or ice,” Mark says. Mark, the great equivocator. “Ice if it feels good. Either/or.”

“But which is better?” I plead.

“Whatever feels good.”

I think of the three men at the bar last night. That golden drink making my blood brighten and sing. The watery red eyes of the middling man fixed on me in such sympathy. But nothing feels good, does it?

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

Mark claps me on the shoulder twice. “Hang in there,” he says.

And I can’t help it. I picture my dead hanging body for a second. Swinging from a hook on the ceiling. Mark getting the news by phone. Nodding soberly. Perhaps even burying his face in his hands. It puts things in perspective for him. It makes him understand that pain is not just a guide, not just simply information, not just a friendly teacher of lessons I need to learn. And then it’s Mark’s body hanging from the ceiling I picture.

As I walk out, I pass the new girl, who is happily stretching on a gym mat. Rolling the backs of her legs and butt with a foam roller, the way Mark showed me, the way Mark shows us all. He’s walked over to her, and she and Mark are bantering about their running schedules. Probably she has something easy and treatable, like plantar fasciitis. All she needs is for Mark to rub her feet, to demonstrate some targeted stretching. Or maybe she does have something more grave, more elusive. Maybe she is one of the Nerve Women. Women of the invisible pain. Women alight with blinking red webs. No spider in sight. But the web is there.