The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [256]
Trauma was a strange thing, because you could be unaware of its presence, like diseased cells lurking in your body (a natural enough thought in a hospital) or like bulbs that would break the soil’s surface only when stirred in their depths by the penetrating warmth of the sun.
Keller remembered the sun—no, the moon—of Lynn’s cradle. The cradle meant to hold three babies that held only one. He had suggested that Sue Anne, depressed after the birth, return to school, get her degree in art history, teach. He had had a notion of her having colleagues. Friends. Because he was not a very good friend to have. Oh, sometimes, sure. It had been a nice gesture to buy a plane ticket for someone who needed to visit a dying friend. How ironic it was, his arranging for that ticket the same day he, himself, might have died.
Sigrid was wearing the gray sweater, the necklace with the cross. Her son had blown apart her world. And Keller was not going to be any help: he would not even consider trying to help her put it together again. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men . . . even Robert Penn Warren couldn’t put Sigrid together again.
Keller had tried that before: good intentions; good suggestions; and his wife had screamed that whatever she did, it was never enough, never enough, well, maybe it would be enough if she showed him what strength she possessed—what strength he hadn’t depleted with his sarcasm and his comic asides and his endless equivocating—by throwing the lamp on the floor, his typewriter against the wall (the dent was still there), the TV out the window. These thoughts were explained to him later, because he had not been home when she exhibited her significant strength. The squirrels had eaten every bulb. There was not going to be one tulip that would bloom that spring. He suspected otherwise—of course the squirrels had not dug up every bulb—but she was in no state of mind to argue with. Besides, there were rules, and his role in the marriage was not to be moderate, it was to be provocative. His daughter had said so.
And there she was, his daughter, rushing to his side, accompanied by a nurse: the same person who had once been shown to him swaddled in a pink blanket, now grown almost as tall as he, her face wrinkled then, her face wrinkled now.
“Don’t squint,” he said. “Put your glasses on. You’ll still be pretty.”
He stood quickly to show her he was fine, which made the nurse and a doctor who rushed to his side very angry. He said, “I don’t have health insurance. I demand to be discharged. The gun got discharged, so it’s only fair that I be discharged also.”
The nurse said something he couldn’t hear. The effort of standing had left him light-headed. Across the room, Sigrid appeared in duplicate and went out of focus. Lynn was negating what he’d just said, informing everyone in a strident voice that of course he had health insurance. The doctor had quite firmly moved him back to his gurney, and now many hands were buckling straps over his chest and legs.
“Mr. Keller,” the nurse said, “you lost quite a bit of blood before you got here, and we need you to lie down.”
“As opposed to up?” he said.
The doctor, who was walking away, turned. “Keller,” he said, “this isn’t ER, where we’d do anything for you, and the nurse isn’t your straight man.”
“Clearly not,” he said quickly. “She’s a woman, we assume.”
The doctor’s expression did not change. “I knew a wiseass like you in med school,” he said. “He couldn’t do the work, so he developed a comedy routine and made a big joke of flunking out. In the end, I became a doctor and he’s still talking to himself.” He walked away.
Keller was ready with a quick retort, heard it inside his head, but his lips couldn’t form