CHAPTER THRIRTY-SIX

Finally, the retching noises stopped and Sharon was able to relax. She heard a garbled, plaintive proclamation of suffering, followed by Al's voice, low, gravelly but consoling. The toilet flushed and the pipes within the thin dividing wall whistled their indignation. More soothing murmurs and a sniffling sigh. Chester keened piteously, empathizing with the sick child. The floor creaked as Al got to his feet, and the voices moved into the narrow corridor.

"That's a boy," Al was saying. "Almost there. Whoops! Hang onto my pant leg, buddy. That's it. We're almost there."

Sharon could almost see the expression of worshipful obedience that she knew the boy would be wearing. No matter how sick or grouchy he was, Esteban always put on his bravest face for Al. For some reason the aging aviator brought out the best in the little victim of leukemia. If he did the same thing for his subordinates, Sharon could see how he had obtained his chestful of ribbons.

They were in the bedroom now, and the voices were reduced to irregular humming. Sharon turned her eyes back to her painting.

It was an idea that she had been working on since Esteban's appendectomy, pouring her energies into careful sketches and preliminary color charts. Usually Sharon was opposed to over-thinking art. Art was emotion and spontaneity. Somehow, though, this painting was different. It had lacked something in the original concept: that extra spark that would make a good painting into a perfect painting. No longer. The conversations with Juan about Esteban's future had resolved the question and allowed her to start transferring her idea onto the canvas.

The picture was an impression of the night of Esteban's post-operative discharge. A starkly realistic light bulb spread tendrils of orange into a netherworld of the blue hues of the desert night. Colored silhouettes of abstract human forms were set against this background: a woman, a man, and on the man's lap, a child. They were not recognizable, but merely curvaceous shapes. The woman was done in a soft, rippling violet that after a week's careful attention almost had the quality of velvet. Her long hair was feathered on the side of her face inclined towards the man and the child, and on the other side it formed a smooth, veil-like bow. The man, vanishing into the midnight blues around him, was done in black. His shoulders were broader than the model's, but the gentle way his arms encircled the child had needed no adjusting. The child was slightly disproportionate—not enough to be unattractive, but just enough that one could sense there was something different about him. His feet were a lurid, sickening green that leeched up his legs: decay and sickness and ugliness that faded away into the radiant white that shone from his face, making brilliant the night. In small, shining hands he clutched pebbles: brown, grey, tawny and beige. One was luminous blue: a perfectly round, sapphire-colored marble with emerald continents and diamond clouds. And whenever the light exuding from the boy touched the man, the blackness seemed to withdraw, uncovering pale flesh laced with faint scars.

It was perfect, Sharon thought as she added another shadow to the woman's flowing skirt. It was the kind of painting you lived to create. An exact transfer of the concept to the reality.

In the bedroom, she could hear Al singing quietly. She paused to listen. It was that absurd little "adding song" that he seemed so fond of. She'd never heard it before Esteban's illness.

"Two and two are four," Al sang. Sharon wasn't certain what the key was, but she was pretty sure he wasn't quite on it. "Four and four are eight. That's all you have on your businesslike mind."

In all probability, it was the last thing on the child's mind, but that didn't detract from the simple sweetness of her battle-hardened husband singing to a little boy.

"Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds. You and your arithmetic will probably go far," Al continued. Then his voice grew quieter and Sharon could hear the floor groan under his insufficient weight as he crept from the room. "Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds. Seems to me you'd stop and see how beau-ti-ful they are."

For a moment, Sharon hoped that he would come into the studio, but of course the feet moved away towards the kitchen, and a minute later she heard the tinkling of ice in a glass. She sighed. They had made love a couple of times since his return from the hospital, but always in the wake of a petty argument that they never really resolved because they were too busy jumping on each other. The atmosphere between them had grown very cold indeed. They didn't talk anymore, except about Esteban. There was a lot of talk about him.

The second session of chemo was almost halfway through, and it was making the child horribly sick: much worse than the last time. All his hair was gone now, and he was a painfully skinny little wraith with a large, smooth head. He could eat only the most bland and simple foods, and even that not on the days he went in for I.V. treatments. According to Celestina, he slept all the time now. Al had become an anti-infective Nazi both in his own trailer and in Celestina's, for the doctors were constantly reminding him that every effort had to be made to keep the child from contracting any illness. His immune system was dangerously depressed.

Sharon was beginning to think that Al was dangerously depressed, too. He didn't have the same spring in his step, though he always had a smile on his face when there was anyone to see. He was more prone to nightmares than he had been, and more than once she had awakened in the middle of the night to find herself and Juan, still busy with the new library building and still residing on their sofa, alone in the trailer: dog and master gone, but both vehicles still there and no light up the street at Celestina's. She didn't know where Al went at such times, but she didn't really want to ask. It wasn't really any of her business.

His shoulder was healing, although the physiotherapist he was seeing said he would have to lay off the heavy lifting for at least two months. He still wore a sling around the house, mostly because five days ago Sharon had caught him trying to carry Esteban from the 'Vette to the house. After that fight, she had mandated that he use the support to remind himself that he was recovering and he should damned well take it easy!

Sharon absent-mindedly put her brush in the turpentine, set down her palette and left the studio. It was unusual for Al not to lie down for a nap with the child. Maybe it was an opportunity for a little heart-to-heart.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, his back to the living room. A nearly-empty glass of whiskey and ice was at his elbow, he had a steno pad under one hand, and he was bent low over some kind of magazine. Sharon approached.

"What's this?" she asked, coming up behind him and working her hand on his right shoulder. He hissed a little in surprise and looked up.

"Oh, hi," he said. "Nothing. It's nothing."

It wasn't nothing: it was an auto trader magazine with ads for second-hand motorcycles. Sharon smiled. "Thinking of buying a toy?"

"Actually, no," Al said. "I'm thinking of getting rid of the Corvette."

Sharon rounded the table and sat across from him. He drained his glass and reached for the bottle to refill it. "Really?" she said.

"Yeah. Just a thought. You know, and replace it with something else."

Sharon grinned. "That's a good idea," she said. "You know, I always thought it would be neat to have a Mercedes. There are all kinds of things you could do with that sleek, flat hood…"

He let out a guffaw of disbelief. "You'd buy a Mercedes Benz just to repaint it?"

"No," she said. "I'd buy a Mercedes Benz because it's a beautiful car… and then personalize it!"

"You're something else," he told her with an odd look. Then he turned back to the magazine. "Actually, I was thinking of getting a bike."

"A motorcycle? At your age?"

Al glared at her. "What does age have to do with it?" he demanded. "The day I'm too old for a motorcycle is the day you can dig a hole six feet long and three feet wide and put me in it!"

"More like a hole five and a half feet long," Sharon teased. He glowered, so she laughed. "Take it easy, sailor. I'm not trying to get in a dig on your manhood or anything. Why do you want a motorcycle?"

Al shrugged. "It's cheaper to run, they're terrific to ride. I might be able to cut some miles off the commute to the Project if I could go off-road a bit—"

"You are not taking a bike off-road!" Sharon cried.

He looked like he wanted to argue this, but instead he thumped his hand down on the table. "Look, the 'Vette's a waste," he said. "It's pricy to run, pricy to tune up, and there's no reason we need it. I can use your van when I take Stevie to the hospital, and I could get to and from work on the bike."

Sharon paused. How serious was the financial question? Al had always seemed to think that the money and effort the Corvette required was worth it. Were things so serious that he was actually thinking of getting rid of it for economic reasons?

"Besides," Al added with a smirk; "I really would love to ride a bike again."

Reminiscing was better than fighting, and infinitely preferable to worrying. "Again?" Sharon said.

"Sure," Al said. "My first car was a bike. A '48 Harvey Knucklehead."

"Knucklehead seems appropriate. But you were fourteen in '48," Sharon pointed out.

Al shrugged. "I got it second-hand off a scrap dealer the year I graduated high school. It'd been in some kinda crash on Long Island. It was a steal."

Sharon laughed at the thought. "Your first car was a smashed-up motorcycle?"

"I'll have you know I'm a damned fine mechanic!" Al told her. "All it needed was a bit of tender, loving care. Inside of two months I had the fastest bike around." His eyes twinkled with nostalgia. "I used to head downtown and find some company. You ever rode behind a guy on a bike?"

"One or two," Sharon said. "Rich had one in high school."

"I can't really imagine Rich on a bike," Al laughed.

Sharon shrugged. "Believe it or not," she said. "That phase didn't last long, though. Only long enough for him to find a good car." She looked down at her paint-stained hands. "Well, I've got to go and wash up," she told him. "You do whatever you want with the Corvette. It's your car. But no off-road biking!"

"Aye-aye, ma'am," Al said, turning back to his computations.

MWMWMWMWMWMWMMWMWMWMWMWMWWMWMWMWMWMWM

That evening after Celestina was back from the dry cleaner's and Al was gone to Starbright, Sharon dug around the house looking for her husband's bank statements and VISA bills. She couldn't find them. Damn him, he must be keeping them at the Project! How bad were things getting, if he was trying to hide the state of his finances from her?

A week later, Al sold the Corvette. Apparently he got a very good price for it, at least from the allusions he made. Certainly, Sharon imagined, his little modifications to the engine would have made it a popular buy. He bought a bike shortly after that. It had to be at least ten years old: a big, durable monster that certainly hadn't spent most of its life in the desert. It looked like it had come from the Midwest: its bodywork was rusting and anything but attractive. Sharon couldn't quite believe her eyes. Nevertheless, she endured the ordeal of public transit to and from her classes for three weeks while Al was without a drivable vehicle of his own. Three Sundays was all it took for him to overhaul the whole thing. He gave it a sleek black coat of enamel, and polished the chrome until it glittered. When he was done, she had to admit it was a gorgeous machine.

It was some consolation that he always wore a helmet, and he had a hard-wearing leather jacket and chaps. Still, she couldn't delude herself into thinking he was riding safely, and she often wondered what it would do to his shoulder if he took a tumble while ripping through the desert at ninety miles an hour on that thing.