Varina(13)

He raises a finger to a redcap porter and asks the man about The Retreat. What kind of place? Surely just what it appeared, an exclusive resort hotel?

The redcap is about fifty, not tall but big shouldered from shifting baggage all day for thirty years. Brass buttons shined bright down the breast of his uniform jacket. He is darker than James by several degrees.

He studies James carefully and says, Looking to take a room?

—No.

—Good. You’re not close enough to passing to test them. Sundown’s probably their borderline. Like little towns bragging no black man ever spent the night there and lived to tell it. Except polite about it. Plenty welcome during daylight hours to build roads, lay brick, plow gardens, clean houses, swing nine-pound hammers.

James says, Last Sunday, about this time, they let me sit in the lobby. But they made sure I knew it was grudging. I’ll be back for the six-thirty-five to Albany. I just need to know what the place is.

—Hotel. People stay there because it’s nice. The view and the food and the service. But they’ve got doctors. Guests can get treatments.

—Treatments for what?

—I couldn’t tell you what ailments those people come down with. Tired of living, mainly. Must get dreary having nothing useful to do.

James laughs and says, Thank you, sir. You’ve set me straight.

He reaches out a coin, and the man pinches it out of habit but then lets go. He says, Save that for The Retreat. Might need it.


THE OPHELIA in the guests’ upcoming production of Hamlet—a woman of twenty or so named Laura—stops by V’s room. She doesn’t knock but opens the door and drifts right in without a word. She wears a thin nightgown and light shawl and goes barefoot though the day is coming toward midmorning. Her hair, a beautiful blond tousle, holds light from the window in an aura around her face.

She is the youngest daughter from a cigarette-paper fortune, and her skin stretches over her bones pale and thin as the diaphanous rectangles that pay for therapy to ease her only two defects—which are that she sometimes seems to be hearing conversations different from the ones actually taking place, and that she sometimes becomes excessively demonstrative in her attraction to men.

She comes to V’s chair and without a word climbs into her lap and wraps her arms around V’s neck and rests her head on V’s chest. She draws a long deep breath and hums a bit of “Sunflower Slow Drag,” her fingers twitching to press imaginary keys. Soon she falls asleep. Her bony body relaxes and settles deep against V. Her skinny feet hang almost to the floor. V brushes her lips against the mass of blond hair and tries to shape her mind still as a mud puddle on a windless day. Tries to sit and wait quiet inside her head until the particulates settle to the dirty bottom and the water becomes clear as glass. But no matter how much she instructs her thoughts toward stillness, they circle, loop, and repeat, churning against themselves, whitewater climbing and spraying over rocks already passed.

When V returns to New York she plans to seek instruction on this topic from a Yogi or some other Eastern mystic. The city is full of them lately. Or maybe she’ll find a piano teacher to remind her how to play, and she’ll sit doodling repetitive minor key largos for a couple of hours a day to shape her mind in a helpful calm direction.

Laura wakes after perhaps half an hour and looks up. Her eyes are hazel with striae dark as walnut.

She says, Did you come to me, or did I come to you?

Her voice vibrates with a thin hoarse crack.

—The latter, V says.

—Has breakfast been served?

—Some time ago. Luncheon will be in a couple of hours.

—Oh, good. I could nap longer.

Laura breathes deep, one cycle through her mouth and two through her nose, and then she’s gone again. V reaches to her wrist and presses her middle finger into the tangle of bone and gristle to find a heartbeat. The girl throbs at long intervals. V tries to number the beats saying one Mississippi, two Mississippi. She gets thirty beats a minute, which doesn’t seem right. Not even possible. V worries the girl will die in her arms, and she doesn’t need another gone child.

Laura smells like cut rye grass and ripe pears and a pillowcase needing washing. The skin of her cheeks is poreless and white as a piece of everyday china. She weighs nothing, rests against V like a goose down pillow. Laura doesn’t remind V of her own children in the least, but she does call back youth. Like holding a pale version of her own young self.

V leans to Laura’s ear and breathes, fainter than a whisper, an arrangement of three words. Be well, get well. She says it over and over like a prayer, a chant, an old mystic rhythm that if repeated long enough works magic.

At some point, V may have fallen asleep too. Or at least into a daze, watching the patterns of light through the window—a vertical rectangle of landscape, shades of green and blue, ridgeline and sky. The changes of light through the day happen in such slow rhythms that you have to pay strict attention to follow the melody.

At least she doesn’t get bored, wishing she could reach ten feet to the nearest book. Each ticking minute tingles with life. Sheltering this sad girl, her shallow breaths and slow heart, abandoned by her family to the questionable authority of the self-satisfied alienists and mesmerists and semidoctors at The Retreat. Laura is lonely, alone, isolate. V keeps breathing the spell, Be well, get well.

Laura shifts her legs a bit, and the bottoms of her feet present themselves. Ivory, amber, and coal dust. Her shanks glow tight along the shinbone, a blond shimmer of fine hair down the slack muscle of the calf. V holds this body with its reluctant spark of life inside, compassed by such a frail container of skin, all its messy fluids and mysterious greasy dark organs held within a membrane hardly more substantive than a soap bubble. Touch it gently and it pops. Gone to nothing.