“It’s because of your face,” he said.
It seemed she’d heard it many times before. She let the subject die in a short silence. “I wanted to ask you something. I was wondering what you meant about being a knight of faith. Remember?”
A cold wind blew through the room but nothing moved. “I don’t know what it means.” He felt terrible. He needed something funny to say. “I just have the feeling I am one.”
“It’s from Kierkegaard, right?”
“That’s not where I got it. I heard a priest talk about it, I think. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Are you going to mop your face with your napkin now?”
“Yeah,” he said, and he did.
“I’ll tell you my secret, if you’ll tell me yours.”
“What’s yours?”
“Is it a deal?”
“Only if I think your secret is worth it.”
“Lenny, is it a deal? Whatever it’s worth.”
“Okay,” he said. “You first.”
“I’m tired of the gay life. I just keep getting hurt. That’s why I’m with you.”
“Is that it?”
“Ever since I saw you at Mass that day, I’ve known it was going to be you.”
“Because I was at church?” It shocked him that he could talk, because all the sensations he’d felt when he’d first had tea with her, lightheadedness, a great momentum, a vision that she was made of air, were coming over him again. “I’m not that religious.”
“I know. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen you at Mass.”
“Because I’m still recovering from it,” he said. “One shot lasts a long time with me. I’m serious.”
“I believe you.” For a minute she just watched his face. “So what’s your big secret? What is it that makes you so—closed up?”
“It’s just crazy,” he said. “A crazy feeling.”
She said nothing, but only held on to the stem of her wineglass, her left hand in her lap, and watched him.
“It’s this crazy feeling that I’m being called,” he said finally. “But I’m not listening.”
“Called to the priesthood—is that it?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I’m not listening.” He felt as if his heart would break now. “I’m running away.”
She said, “Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“No,” he said.
“What do you think it is?”
“For all I know,” he said, “I could be the Second Coming.”
She didn’t receive it as lightly as he’d tried to send it. “But, Lenny,” she said with great tenderness, “don’t you see that’s crazy? It’s a delusion.”
“I told you it was. I said it was crazy. But I’m still running away, no matter what. Maybe the idea is just a fantasy, but the fear is for real.”
“But if it’s just some kind of delusion, then what’s there to be scared about?”
“I’m scared it’s not really a total delusion. It could be just a blown-up version of the truth. Like”—maybe he was making a fool of himself, but it was started now—“like a kid who thinks his mother’s calling him to come inside and be the man of the house, when really she just wants him to clean up his room or something like that. But she’s calling, that’s the thing, she’s calling.” He felt the world loosen around him. It was as if the small restaurant suddenly gave him all the space he needed.
Leanna seemed very moved by all this. She laughed, but her voice was hoarse. “Whoever’s calling you, don’t go in, okay? Stay out here with me for a while.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Definitely.”
There was a sweet shyness between them now, a moment that didn’t live through the little conversation with the waiter, the declining of dessert and the business of paying the check. English conceived that he hadn’t, from the start, ever been in charge of this romance, if that’s what it was, and he gave up. Waiting for the change and thinking nothing at all, he hit on the idea that the way to deal with this woman, with his time on this eerie peninsula, maybe with his whole life, was to stand back and look at it as he would a painting he didn’t understand and probably couldn’t appreciate. Climbing up from the dark underground into the decadent glitter of vending, he watched this shopping center as he might one of Jerry Twinbrook’s beaches, the arrested moment of it, and he thought he caught the somber heart of each bright color, the moons, so to speak, of which these colors were the suns, the softer actuality that Jerry Twinbrook had known about for a long time. He was wrenched by a thought: I’ve got to find that guy. It was a necessary thing.
Someone was calling him. “Somebody’s calling you,” Leanna said, catching him at the edge of the walk before he stepped out into the vast parking lot, where they didn’t need to go—the theater was just across the mall. “Lenny English!” It was Phil, his landlord’s cabdriver cousin, lounging against a black limousine-like taxi. “Where are you, in another world?”
“How are things?” English surfaced from his dreams. “You’re on the early shift tonight.”
“I’m on two shifts, man—it’s the prime of my life, time to move, time to make money.” Phil drew English close, his arm over English’s shoulders, and put his head down as if he were going to say something about their shoes. But he had something to say about Leanna, who waited on the walk and looked at the window of a store. “Lenny English,” Phil said. “There’s only one way I can tell you this: That woman there goes after girls. She don’t go after men. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you get the underlying meaning?”
“She’s a dyke.”
“Can you handle it that I told you that? Are we still buddies?”
“She’s just a friend,” English said, embarrassed. “But listen, I’m glad I ran into you.”
“I’m glad I ran into you, too, man. I been rooting for you. I know it’s tough in a new town.”
“What I wanted to ask you about,” English said, “you’re a ’Nam vet, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah—how’d you know?”
“You have that quality,” English said.
“What. I’m a little zoned, maybe?” Phil was concerned.
“No, no, it’s just, you know, that quality.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Phil assured him. “Right. Right.”
“I was wondering if you know this guy Wilkinson, I forget his first name. He’s head of ’Nam Vets for Cape Cod.”
“Wilkinson? Sure. Yeah. I know everybody, man.”
“What about the Truth Infantry?”
“Truth Infantry?”
“Yeah.”
“Truth Infantry? I don’t know. I’ll find out. Get back to me, okay?”
Leanna was stepping over to them, and so English wanted to change the subject. “Have you ever heard of the artist Gerald Twinbrook?” he asked Phil.
Phil seemed to think he was on the spot now. “Gerald—yes, I have. I have. I’m familiar with his work.”
“You know him? Do you have any impression of him maybe?”
“Gerald Twinbrook?”
“Twinbrook, yeah.”
“Twinbrook … No, I don’t.” Phil’s tone was that of a person being interviewed. “I, uh, it sounds vaguely familiar, that’s about it.”
“This is Leanna.”
“Hi, yeah, I know you,” Phil said.
“You know me?”
“Well, what I mean, you know—I don’t know you,” Phil said.
“Phil. That’s Phil.”
“Hi, Phil.”
“Get in touch with me, man. I’m in the book.”
“Good deal,” English said.
“I think we’re late. We’re going to the movies,” Leanna said.
“The Red Shoes,” Phil said. “See The Red Shoes immediately.”
“We are,” Leanna said. “That’s the one.”
“You’re gonna love it. I cried,” Phil told them.
“I’ll give you a c
all,” English said.
“I’ll answer,” Phil told him as they hurried off.
They were late for the film and had to go all the way down to the second row. English got very edgy sitting beside her and thinking only about the dark, and about sitting beside her. Within two minutes, the movie was embarrassing him. Was it too stupid? Was it possible she wasn’t enjoying herself?
Then he remembered that he still hadn’t talked to Ray Sands. “I need all the change you’ve got,” he said as softly as he could. “I have to call Provincetown.”
“Okay.” She gave him her coin purse out of her handbag.
“I was supposed to tell my boss something. I have to call him.”
“Okay.”
Halfway up the aisle he realized he could have asked her if she wanted any popcorn—they’d been in too much of a hurry coming in. But he couldn’t go back now. I’ll get popcorn, he thought. Buttered, medium-size. He pushed through the doors into a small panic of kids and patrons entering and leaving the other movies in this place. He felt much better here, where the pandemonium was outside him, than he did in there shoved up against Leanna’s warm breathing silhouette, where it was all in his heart. I am a grownup, he declared to himself, cutting in front of two little boys wearing paper 3-D glasses, who were about to use the pay phone by the ladies’ room.
“What’s the 3-D movie?” he asked them as he deposited seven quarters. But they were mad at him and wouldn’t say.
Grace answered.
“Mrs. Sands. It’s Lenny English. Is Mr. Sands awake by any chance? I think he was expecting me to tell him something, but he was asleep—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s terrible!”
“Terrible,” English repeated.
“Bud’s sick! What am I gonna do!”
“He’ll be okay. Don’t worry—”
“Bud’s turning purple! He got vomit all over him!”
“Wait a minute. Hold on,” English said. “Is this for real?”
“Who are you! Why you did this to Bud!”
“Try and—wait. Wait a minute. Can I speak to Mr. Sands?”
“Bud fell over—he got a face like a beet!”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” English said before he could think of anything else to say.
“Yeah! Okay! Tomorrow!”
Grace hung up, and so did English.
He dialed the radio station, because Sands lived nearby and maybe somebody could run over and check on him. His palms were slick with sweat because he felt he might be in a position to make a terrible mistake, something fatal. The line was busy.
Before I do anything, English thought, I’m going to get some popcorn. As he waited at the counter, another twelve-year-old wearing white paper 3-D glasses that were crooked on his face told him, “Hey, your jacket looks 3-D! It’s wild!”
“Shut up,” his sister said, grabbing the back of his neck. “God.” She looked up toward the heavens.
“It is 3-D,” English said. “This is 3-D.” He was annoyed, even frightened. “Real life is 3-D.” He got his popcorn and the lady laid his quarter change in a spot of melted butter on the glass. Before I do anything, he thought, I’m going to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. In the bathroom he splashed his face with water and forgot all about his popcorn, knocking it with his elbow and spilling half of it into the neighboring sink. He heard a man talking to his child in one of the stalls: “ … or I’ll take you home right now.” I have got to function, English told himself. “That’s the last time we try that,” the man’s voice proclaimed. Wiping his hands and face with paper towels, English heard them passing behind him toward the rows of sinks and mirrors and the exit. The faucet went on and he could hear the father saying, “That’s disgusting.” English asked himself, Why am I listening to this? I’ve got to think.
False alarm, English decided.
But he couldn’t let it pass. He wanted someone to reassure him, he wanted to feel at ease. He hurried back to the pay phone, clutching his half-empty bucket of greasy popcorn. The line at WPRD was still busy. And now Sands’s home phone only rang and rang and nobody picked it up.
I’m calling in a false alarm, he told himself, dialing the operator. “I don’t know how to say this,” he told her. “I think there’s an emergency in Provincetown, but I’m not completely sure about it. Could you get the police to check on it?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said.
“I just—” Speech deserted him. He couldn’t explain. “Please connect me with the Provincetown police,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”
“I’ll connect you,” she said, and rang them.
Someone answered. “Whoever you are,” English said, “do you know Ray Sands?”
“Who am I talking to here?”
“I’m his assistant. Leonard English. I’m in Hyannis, I just talked to his wife, and she says he’s very sick. Could you check on him? Do you know him? He lives on Cutter Street. If he, you know, if he needs an ambulance—”
“Ray Sands? Sure, we’ll check it out.”
“Great. Unbelievable. Thanks.”
“You’re entirely welcome,” the person said.
English put the phone back: I’m done. It’s out of my hands. He left the bright lobby where nothing made sense.
In the darkness he found Leanna and handed her what was left of the popcorn. “I don’t want this,” she said. He hunched down in his seat and began eating it himself. “You make a lot of noise,” she whispered. “Don’t eat with your mouth open. Look at her outfit,” she said of the woman on the screen. “What a fox.”
For two minutes he tried to settle into the movie, but it was like watching a film within a film. He was very much aware that the people on the screen were larger than the people in the theater, and that their statements came out of loudspeakers and echoed from the wall behind him. Someone was dancing and people were applauding. “Weird things are happening,” he whispered to Leanna. “I gotta make another call.”
“Are you a drug dealer?” she whispered. “Because you sure spend some time on the phone.”
This time there was somebody to answer at Ray Sands’s house, a policeman who identified himself quickly and English didn’t get his name. “I called about an ambulance earlier,” he told the officer. “I wanted to find out if Ray Sands is okay.”
“Who is this?” the policeman’s voice said.
“I’m his assistant, Leonard English.”
“Your boss is pretty sick, Mr. English. He’s on his way to Cape Cod Hospital right now.”
“Cape Cod Hospital? What’s wrong with him?”
“It looks like a heart,” the policeman’s voice said, “but I wouldn’t diagnose.”
“What’d the ambulance people say?”
“That’s what they thought—a heart. You’re his assistant? You pretty close to him?”
“No,” English said. “I’m not.”
“They were doing CPR on him, the whole routine.” Now he heard the excitement in the policeman’s voice. “I’d say he wasn’t too alive when he left here.”
“Well,” English said, “okay. Thank you.”
“You’re entirely welcome,” the policeman’s voice said.
He stood in the aisle, bending down to speak to Leanna. “Listen, I’m all fucked up. There’s an emergency.”
She looked at him and turned back to the screen and then looked at him again. “You mean urgent business, or a real emergency?” She looked at the screen.
“My boss is having some kind of heart attack. Where’s Cape Cod Hospital?”
“It’s here, in Hyannis. Near the airport. Don’t you know where Cape Cod Hospital is?”
“Show me, would you? I’m completely lost.”
English couldn’t get the attention of the emergency room’s clerk, a well-kept young man doing twenty things at once, gesturing to an orderly and searching through a cream-colored filing cabinet while holding the telephone receiver between h
is shoulder and his jaw and saying, “Yeah—right—yeah,” into the mouthpiece. Surrounding the clerk in his office, which was nothing more than an oversized cubicle, what appeared to be patients’ charts cluttered every surface. There were charts on the floor covered with the prints of shoe soles. The waiting room English stood in was glutted with patients and their relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to be holding bloody rags against their faces. English tapped on the cubicle’s wired-glass window again, this time more forcefully. Behind him a burly man in a bloodstained down-filled vest was explaining to the others there how his wife had been injured. “First I kind of pinned her with this arm,” he told them, “and then I went to work on her face with my elbow.” When he dropped his red soft-drink can in the midst of gesturing with it, he started to cry, saying, “Now I spilled my fucking Coke. I just plain lost my head!” He marched across the hall into the trauma room and English saw him in there examining the features of his wife, an immense woman sitting on one of the high, narrow gurneys with her legs dangling. The man looked into her eyes, now blackened, and into her sutured face. He fell to his knees before her. Meanwhile, “You’re going to be all right,” the clerk said into the telephone. “You’re going to live forever.” Children were screaming, men and women wept, and Coca-Cola spread out over the floor and under the plastic chairs. One man, sitting stock-still in the middle of all this, gripped a hunter’s arrow in his fist and stared at it. English felt this was no place to come for help. He wanted Leanna, but she was in the ladies’ room.
The radio on the clerk’s desk started beeping. The clerk answered. A kazoo-like voice lost in spitting static spoke to him. English couldn’t make out a word, but the clerk was astonished by the message. “What’s your ten-twenty? What’s your ETA?” The radio’s voice crackled back at him. “Shit,” the clerk said. He seemed to notice only now that he was still holding the phone receiver in his hand. He hung it up and then immediately lifted it again, looking at the intercom on his desk and surveying its buttons helplessly. He dialed a number on the phone and said, “This is ER. We got a heart arriving in about—less than ten minutes.”
“I think I know that patient,” English said to him through the hole in the glass.