American Appetites

  “But I don’t quite see,” Ian said, “how this applies to us. To Dr. Flax and us.”

  Bianca looked at him levelly, unblinkingly. He had a moment’s panic: Does she think I purposefully injured Glynnis? Tried to kill her? Bianca said, “No, you wouldn’t.”

  Ian rose blindly from the table, thinking of escape. He would run out into the street, clear his head, breathe. That this sullen young woman in the gunmetal-gray sweatshirt and well-worn jeans, hair straggling in her face, was his daughter, and therefore his, struck him, for the instant, as a fact of melancholy irony, a fact that his life had brought him to, as it had brought him to the comatose woman in the hospital bed seven floors above. They were women entrusted to his care, whom he loved desperately, but of what good was his love to them?

  He walked away but did not leave the cafeteria; his legs simply could not take him out the door. Instead he bought two more cups of coffee, Styrofoam cups of bitter hot coffee, and brought them back to the table.

  Where, now, Bianca sat crying, tears glistening thinly on her cheeks. “It’s just—you know, Daddy, the way it has turned out, I mean the way Mother woke up as she did, clearly conscious, and looking right at us and recognizing us . . . it’s just—” She broke off, baffled, unable to complete her sentence. “It’s just . . . something I can’t accept.”

  Ian shivered and said, “Yes.”

  LIKE IAN, BIANCA was careful always to refer to what had happened to Glynnis as an accident.

  When Ian had telephoned her at college she’d been upset, emotional, asking Ian several times what had happened, and how, my God how; but once she arrived home she asked no further questions. Ian had shown her the window that had been broken—that is to say, the new window that had replaced the broken window—but, subdued, she’d made no comment beyond remarking with a shudder that plate-glass windows and doors are notoriously dangerous, like children’s playgrounds . . . did he know that the statistics were really quite shocking, involving playground accidents?

  Nor did she inquire about whether they had been drinking that night. Or even whether they had been quarreling.

  She did, however, ask about Ian’s hand, his sixty-five stitches. “Was it trying to save Mommy?”

  Ian, staring at the hand as if it constituted a riddle, said slowly, “Yes, I suppose that was it . . . trying to save Mommy when the window broke. But I failed.”

  It was the first time since Bianca had passed the age of four or five that, in addressing her, Ian referred to Glynnis as “Mommy.” The word reverberated oddly between them.

  WHEN FATHER AND daughter had a rare meal at home they did not eat in the dining room, of course, but in the kitchen at the table in the corner, round and wooden-spoked and rather cozy there beside Glynnis’s cork bulletin board. One side of the table was still heaped with Glynnis’s things—notebooks, recipe cards, magazine and newspaper articles, cookbooks—which Bianca organized into tidier piles but did not remove from the table. She had taken to saving items from The New York Times that might, she thought, be of interest to her mother: food-related articles and recipes.

  The dozens of spice jars in their racks; the shiny copper utensils; the crammed bookshelves; the cork bulletin board with its strata of postcards, snapshots, clippings, invitations; the hanging plants in the southern window (Ian was not certain how frequently they should be watered, and how much: the Swedish geraniums seemed to be dying); the handsome butcher-block table, and the gleaming surfaces of the stove and refrigerator—all bespoke Glynnis: her taste, her tireless effort. “I love this part of the house,” Bianca said. “When I first went away to school, the kitchen was the room I remembered. I have such nice memories of it.” “Yes,” Ian said, smiling. “I do too.”

  Ian did not know if what his daughter said was true; he did not even know if what he said was true. But he knew what must be said.

  Now they were alone together so much, and so intensely, they fell into a pattern of Bianca talking and Ian listening—except for those times, and these were, Ian guessed, rather consciously cultivated times, when Bianca asked Ian about his work. She was most interested, not in demographics, but in biostatistics, a fairly new and innovative field, contiguous with Ian’s but essentially very different. Since her mother’s accident, Bianca spoke yearningly, and, it almost seemed, calculatingly, of wanting “to do good in the world—to try to do good.”

  At other times, she simply talked, her voice bright and nervous as water cascading down a mountain stream: all flash, motion, little depth. Ian perceived that she was terrified of the house’s silence; not even the radio, its dial seemingly fixed at Glynnis’s favorite station, could fill this silence. Ian listened to her, and nodded, and responded, and allowed his thoughts to drift. It seemed to him that at any moment Glynnis would come through a doorway, or the telephone would ring and he would hear Glynnis answering it, in another room.

  Instead, when it rang, Bianca answered it. Rather too quickly, eagerly. Ian overheard her saying, to an unknown party, “Oh, Mother is still the same, her condition is more or less stable, they say it takes a long time to recover from an operation like that, such a major operation, she was on the operating table almost seven hours. . . .” Another time, when Glynnis’s condition had further deteriorated, “Oh, Mother is on a respirator now, it makes breathing easier; breathing, you know, is a purely mechanical activity, it’s just something that is done. . . . But her condition is stable. More or less.”

  Ian thought of Glynnis at all hours of the day, both when he was at her bedside and when he was elsewhere. Unconscious, steadily losing weight, she acquired, in his imagination, a powerful presence, as if he were, in a sense, pregnant with her; as if the responsibility for keeping her alive lay with him: in him. He had let his work at the Institute slide, had spread his authority about, like, he thought, a gardener tossing manure from a pitchfork, among his energetic young assistants.

  Nor were his friends, who telephoned often and invited him and Bianca to dinner often, very real to him. I could live without any of them, he thought.

  And that young red-haired woman, the dancer, whom Glynnis had mistaken for something other than what she was: Ian had not heard from her in weeks and hoped he never would hear from her again.

  THE TELEPHONE RANG a few inches from his head, and Ian, seated at his desk in his study, having dropped off to sleep with his head on his arms, fumbled to pick it up, and it was, with dreamlike abruptness, his friend Leonard Oppenheim . . . calling to ask about Glynnis and about what Leonard called, with some embarrassment, Ian’s financial resources. “We dread interfering but we are somewhat concerned, Paul and I, whether, you know, Ian, you’re going to be hard pressed. I know what medical bills of that kind are like—neurosurgery, intensive care—twelve hundred dollars a day it was, at Columbia Presbyterian, when my poor father . . .” And Ian, sleep-dazed and puzzled, found himself listening to his friend speak at considerable length of his eighty-nine-year-old father, moribund for months after a brain tumor operation and kept alive by high-tech miracle machines and the antiquated, and inhuman, New York State legal code “protecting” patients from euthanasia.

  Euthanasia!

  Ian, feeling faint, gripped the phone receiver so tightly the blood drained out of his fingers. He did not listen—did not listen—and when at last Leonard finished, he said politely, “Thank you for your kindness, Leonard, but I doubt I will need to borrow money; I think our insurance policy will cover most of it, thank you very much.”

  Leonard said quickly, “I have this trust fund, as you might know, and Paul too . . . Paul asks me to tell you that he would like to help too, if, for instance, you wanted to bring in another doctor or surgeon.” Leonard paused; Ian said nothing. “I would never intrude upon you if I weren’t so terribly concerned about Glynnis. It’s such a shock to us all. It happened so suddenly . . . as of course these things do. There have been such disconcerting rumors. . . . But enough of this; I won’t keep you. I simply wanted you to know, Ian, that
should finances be a problem, we would like very much to help: in secret, of course. No one need know but ourselves.” There was another pause. “Ian? Are you there?”

  Ian had not been listening, but he said politely, “Yes.”

  “I hope I haven’t offended you . . . ?”

  Ian said, “Not at all, of course not; I’m grateful for your concern.” “Truly: you aren’t offended?”

  Ian murmured an ambiguous reply and hung up. He was very upset but could not, after only a few minutes, remember exactly why.

  4.

  It was the end of April, and then it was early May, and still Glynnis McCullough lay trapped in her stony sleep, impervious to all appeal. The machine that breathed for her breathed with perfect regularity, yet cruelly. Ian was certain that it must give pain. And the IV fluid that dripped constantly into her veins, and the wires that monitored her heartbeat, her sweat rate, the shimmering pulsations of her brain, turning them into waves on a green computer screen, and the suction devices that drained toxic fluids from her organs . . . all must give pain. Ian thought, as if in wonder, And I feel none of it.

  But he too had lost weight; his clothes felt pleasantly loose on him, like a stranger’s. The feeling seemed to him penitential and therefore beneficent.

  In the highly specialized medical literature he was reading, out of an unexamined conviction that somewhere, duly recorded as medical history, Glynnis’s very case had been transcribed and its mysteries decoded, Ian discovered any number of remarkable things: accounts of comatose patients who sleep for years and then wake to full consciousness and (presumed) normality, like time travelers propelled into the future, yet bereft of a segment of their own lives. (And what did they remember of their years of sleep? “A sort of blur,” one woman said.) There were casualties of combat, accidents, crimes; surgical and anesthetic mishaps; mysterious brain-attacking diseases; there were men, women, children who simply failed to wake from their ordinary sleep . . . as if under a fairy-tale enchantment. But then, for as little reason, they did awake. Sometimes.

  At Glynnis’s bedside, a book or medical journal opened on his knees, Ian often fell into a waking dream, his eyes open but fixed upon Glynnis as she’d been, years ago, a girl, hair red-gold and glossy over her shoulders, approaching him with her bold query: Is something wrong? Can I help? Daring to reach out and touch his sleeve. Later, when they were lovers, she climbed the stairs to his room and knocked on his door, Ian? Ian? Open up, let me in, it’s Glynnis, let me in. She undressed herself and him, laughed her high-pitched delicious laugh, squirmed in his arms, ran her fingers up and down his sides, teasing him for his thinness—I could play your ribs like an xylophone. Ian had never made love to a girl like this before, never in any sociable, protracted, emotional manner; he was an amateur, a baby, endearingly clumsy, so excited by her touch that he ejaculated before he could enter her, to her exasperation and disappointment. Now we’ll have to wait, Glynnis said, sighing, kissing him, and try again. She was twenty years old, an undergraduate arts major, with an interest in so many subjects, so many possible careers—acting, art history, photography, working “in some capacity” at the United Nations, social work, foreign service work—Ian could scarcely keep up with her. She was, she confessed, not a very dedicated student, as such—“Mostly I just want to live.”

  Her face was moon-shaped and beautiful, her body paralyzingly beautiful: breasts like balloons filled with something soft and giving, like water, belly softly rounded, the hips, thighs, solid columnar legs—Ian could not believe his good fortune, for he knew he did not deserve it and played, sometimes, at losing it: “I can’t see what you see in me. I can’t see why on earth you would love me.” He hoped to quarrel with her, to see that, as he suspected, she didn’t seriously want him; yet he held her tight, tight as if she were life itself, in terror of losing her.

  Lying in his lumpy bed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1960, Glynnis in his arms, warm and silky in his arms, and so quickly asleep, her mouth wetly open and her breath deep and intense as a child’s, Ian felt his heart race; he loved her, adored her, wanted to marry her—for how otherwise could he keep her?—yet he feared her, for the very spaciousness of her spirit, all that she promised or threatened, of a life complex beyond his reckoning: a normal life, the life of the species, yet uniquely American. Marriage, children, a job, a position, property to be acquired and protected, and, in time, a place in a community: a reputation. Ian McCullough had wanted to be lost, unnamed, a Kierkegaardian casualty of faith, an existential being-in-the-making, a doomed hero of Camus, a maniac martyr like John Brown. He had studied American political history as if reading a long, lurid, clamorous novel in which self-proclaiming figures contended, each isolated from the other yet citizens of the same enormous landscape. The American continent was large enough to absorb all, yet not so large not to be domesticated. Marry me, Ian begged, and save me.

  He was ravished by the extraordinary hunger she aroused in him. And her own intense pleasure in what they did together, which was a revelation to him: that any girl might feel such things, let alone express them, let alone show gratitude for them. Oh, Jesus, Glynnis wept. Oh, sweet Jesus. And in the morning she would stretch her young body before him, peer at him playfully through her spread fingers. She let the window shade fly up to the ceiling and laughed, unrepentant at what she’d done.

  Ian adored her and was overwhelmed by her. Dreamily she teased, Do you think I’ll get pregnant? Do you think, after last night, I am pregnant? She asked about his mother, and his father, but scarcely listened; she did not care for melancholy tales, however true. She collected his stale, soiled clothes, hauling them out of the closet where he’d hidden them, stuffing them—socks, undershirts, cotton jockey shorts—into a pillowcase, to be carried to the laundromat. She folded towels and sheets atop the machines, loving, she said, the smell of freshly cleaned laundry, burying her face in a bath towel as, with no warning, she’d bury her face in his neck and tickle him with her tongue, Oh love love I’m crazy about you, I don’t give a good goddamn what happens. (She meant: If my father doesn’t want me to want you.) She told him she would rearrange his life, and she meant it; he was made for success and prestige: needed new glasses, his teeth examined, some new clothes, new shoes, a haircut, a different place to live. She examined his bookshelves: political theory, classical philosophy, European history, American history, Marx and Engels, Spengler, Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, whom one of his professors in the graduate school revered. Glynnis opened the Essays in Experimental Logic to a much-annotated page and read, “‘Not to know the world but to control it; and remake it. . . . ’” She crinkled her nose in distaste and tossed the book away. “So much for John Dewey,” she said, wiping her hands. Ian regarded her with amazement and smiled. So much for John Dewey.

  Dewey had also made the cryptic remark that complete adaptation to environment means death. But Ian hadn’t quite understood his meaning, at the time.

  IT WAS IAN’S new practice to nap at odd times during the day, if he could, since sleeping at night had become problematic. He had come to dread the bedroom, the bed: that profound sense of imbalance as he lay, stretched to his full, somehow unnatural length, without Glynnis beside him. Waking in the night he knew that something was wrong but did not always know what it was, how to give it a name. Then he might say aloud, “Oh, my God. Oh, sweet Christ.” His tone at such times was marveling, awestruck. Was Glynnis really in the hospital? Had she really had emergency neurosurgery; was she really in a coma? He understood that these things were true, yet by night, flat on his back, open-eyed and blind in the dark, he could not believe them.

  He worked to imagine the words with which, one day, the imperturbable Flax might greet him. Mr. McCullough, I have some good news for you this morning. Mr. McCullough, there has been an improvement in your wife. Mr. McCullough, I think you will be pleased to hear. . . . The exact phraseology eluded him; he felt like a dull-witted schoolboy, stymied by words. He knew what he wanted to h
ear, but he could not, even in fantasy, hear it.

  Mornings, Glynnis’s absence took on a different quality. Ian dressed as quickly as he could, avoiding mirrors, out of a fear of seeing his wife’s reflection behind him. In his bathroom, running water or showering, he heard, or believed he heard, her voice on the other side of the door; it was a habit of Glynnis’s to speak to him at such times, when he could not properly hear her.

  Whether he had slept fitfully or had not slept at all, he got up each morning at 6 A.M.; he was eager, even hopeful, to begin the day. Unless it was raining hard he went for a run of some two or three miles along the unpaved residential roads and in the woods down behind Pearce Drive, desperate to get in motion, to work off the wire-tight tension in his limbs. Like an aging athlete he prepared for the long, the incalculably long and dangerous day, in which anything might happen for the simple reason that it could not be prevented from happening.

  On the morning of May 12 he rose at his usual time, and put on the soiled clothes he’d worn the morning before, and went out to run along the route he’d run the morning before: filling his lungs with air; working his heart up into a fast percussive beat; taking no interest in where he ran, or over what familiar scene his eyes passed; aware of, but indifferent to, the pains darting through his feet, calves, thighs, back, and the taste of something black and tarry at the back of his mouth. Once he began his run nothing mattered but the beat: keeping to the beat, making no allowance for pain or shortness of breath. He recalled the tragic case, for so it was locally called, of a younger Institute colleague, an urban studies specialist, who, in the habit of jogging for an hour each morning on the Institute grounds, and seemingly in excellent physical condition, was found dead one morning a few years ago on the reservoir embankment. Probable cause of death was cardiac failure, coronary thrombosis: a shock to the community, since the victim had been no more than forty years old.