Note: Excerpt from "Chelsea Hotel #2" © Leonard Cohen, 1974.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The only trouble with having a winter anniversary, Mark Carpenter reflected as he navigated out of town and onto the highway, was that it usually rained. He'd wanted a moonlit swim, but they couldn't do that now. Meg, on the other hand, didn't seem to mind. She had her head on his shoulder, petting his leg fondly. She was just so glad to have a couple of days without responsibilities. A romantic liaison, no kids, no worries. They'd left Carla, Darcy, Bert and baby Jill at home in Georgia under Grandma's capable eyes, and were thoroughly enjoying the little taste of liberty. After an exquisite supper and a night of dancing, they were headed back to the bed and breakfast on the coast. Mark leaned over and kissed Meg's soft hair.
"Happy fifteenth," he murmured.
"Mmh," she sighed. "I love you, flyboy."
He grinned. What more could a man ask of life?
"Stop!" Meg shrieked suddenly, sitting up abruptly and twisting to look out the back windows. "Stop, there's a car…"
Mark hit the brakes, pulling onto the shoulder. Meg popped the glove compartment and pulled out the flashlight she insisted they kept there. With no concern for her evening gown in the pouring rain, she sprung out of the vehicle, jogging back towards the green vehicle lying in the ditch with the driver's door open. Mark got out and followed, grabbing her wrist and pulling her back.
"Careful, honey. You never know…" he said. Then Meg stiffened with a little cry of horror.
"There is!" she exclaimed, starting forward again. "There's someone down there!"
Mark felt his heart racing. Don't panic, he reminded himself. First thing they taught you in flight school. Stay calm and collected.
"Stay here," he said, holding her back. "Stay right here. I'll take a look."
Meg shook her head. "Not likely," she said. "You could need backup. You never know."
Mark spared his wife a brief grin. This was why he'd married her! She was a damned good cook and a great mom, but best of all, she was aces in an emergency. It had been no accident that she was moved from the switchboards to Information at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the only threat worse than that of a nuclear holocaust had been the threat of wholesale civilian panic. Nobody could beat Meg when it came to a level head and a calm voice. When he'd gone off to war Mark had gone without worries, because he knew that whatever happened to him Meg would be able to take care of herself and the kids. He'd been the one who went to pieces over Chip and Bingo: Meg had been the rock of strength. Only, of course, the mourning of Bingo had been premature.
Mark was glad his old friend had made it into space . He'd been genuinely convinced Al had gone off the deep end. To this day, though, he wondered who Holloway had talked to who'd persuaded him so adamantly otherwise.
Meg took off her satin pumps and hitched up the long skirt of her dress, and carefully sidestepped down the incline. It was a deep ditch, seven or eight feet at a fifty-degree incline. Meg slipped a little, but caught herself against the wet grass. Mark followed resolutely. The beam of Meg's flashlight swept the ground, and Mark took in the scene with his limited forensics skills.
The driver had bailed, tossed his cookies, and crawled a few yards away before collapsing in a sodden heap of filthy disco clothes and curling dark hair. It was a boy, short and skinny as hell, lying with his face in the mud. Some kid out joyriding in Pop's Ferrari—and from the smell of the mess he'd left by the car, plastered as heck. Mark wrinkled his nose. Meg thrust the flashlight into his hand and ran forward.
"Hello?" she called. "Hello, can you hear me?"
The little punk didn't answer, of course. Probably unconscious. He couldn't be too badly hurt, though, if he'd managed to get out of the car and drag himself over there before passing out. Mark stood back, holding the light and letting Meg go about her mothering routine. He was never going to let his kids drive.
Meg knelt down and shook the unconscious youth. "Can you hear me?" she repeated. Still no answer. She rolled the body over, wiping mud away from the mouth and nose. The boy coughed, a horrible, cloying, wet cough that was followed by a laborious inhale that whistled and gurgled in his throat.
"My God, he's burning up," Meg murmured. "Honey, don't worry. We're going to help you. Mark, bring the light closer, okay?"
"Is it bad?" Mark asked, approaching uneasily.
"I think he's sick…" Meg fumbled with the kid's tie, loosening it and pulling it away. As she did so, he coughed again, with such force that his whole slender body quivered. Mark winced at the painful whooping gasp that the unconscious boy took, followed as it was by another brutal cough. Meg patted down his hips, looking for a wallet. "Check the car for I.D., okay?" she instructed.
"The light?"
"Well, how are you going to find anything without a light?" Meg demanded. "I've got it under control here."
Of course she did. She always had everything under control. It was what made her special. Mark moved off, listening to Meg talk to the unconscious kid. Inside the car, thrown haphazardly on the floor at the passenger's side, was a suit jacket, soaking wet and rumpled. In the inside pocket, he found a wallet. Turning back to his wife, Mark held the light so it provided for them both, then opened the leather folio.
The next thing he knew he was on his knees next to Meg, and the light was in her hand as he frantically wiped the thick dark muck from the casualty's face. "God…" he breathed. "Bingo."
Meg frowned at him. "What?"
"Bingo," Mark said. "Bingo Calavicci. Al."
"No, it can't be Al," Meg reasoned. "He's much too th—oh!" Her eyes went wide as she recognized their third child's namesake. "Oh, God."
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMElsa cradled the telephone, staring pensively at nothingness. The fool. The stupid man. He could have been killed. The stupid, stupid man.
Why, she wondered, did people like Al Calavicci exist? What kind of conflagration of circumstances could lead a person to take such reckless chances with their own lives? It made no sense.
She was glad such people did exist, though. As turbulent as their two years together had been, she could not deny that there was some need in her heart that they had fulfilled. She felt whole as she had not since Andrew's death. Somehow, the bad marriage that was still so good had patched the hole in her heart, covering it even though it would never be filled. Somehow fighting with Al, sleeping with Al, playing with him, tending to him, arguing with him, coexisting with a person so different from the man she had once thought was the only one she could coexist with, had helped her to a revelation. Life was not a stage missing its principle actor, just because of a badly-timed napalm run eight years ago. Life was her creature, to do with as she pleased. To make mistakes with, to have fun with, even to risk stupidly if she wished to. She had learned that from Al.
He was stable, they said. Expected to make a full recovery, given time, they said. A fool, they said. Should have come to the hospital right off the bat.
The implication was there, too, that she should have brought him to the hospital right off the bat. Elsa resented that. Was she supposed to make unilateral decisions on behalf of a competent human being, merely because she was married to him? She wondered how they expected her to convince Al, of all people, to do anything he didn't want to do.
She was grateful that he would heal. She did not wish him dead, however angry he made her. But she would not go to visit him. She could not. If she did, she knew that she would begin to feel sorry for him again, to have pity on him and sympathy for him. She would want to nurse him back to health, back into a position where he could make her angry. Then they would fall out again, and again she would want to divorce him. It had happened before this way. She was intelligent enough to see the cycle, but was she strong enough to break it?
Yes, she decided. She had to be. It wasn't healthy to live this way, scratching one another's eyes out, using sex as an apology, fighting again. It reminded her of that song, the one they played so often on the radio: "I need you, I don't need you, I need you, I don't need you… And all of that jivin' around."
Well, the jivin', whatever that was, was over. There would be a divorce. She did not care how ill he was (no that wasn't right, she did care, truly, but she must not allow herself to); there would be a divorce. They both needed to escape this destructive spiral.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMAl stared at the junction between wall and ceiling. He hated hospitals. He hated the puritan white of the walls and the linens and the curtains. He hated the smell of disinfectant that haunted the air. He hated the doctors with their condescending approach to healing. He hated the nurses because they weren't Beth. Most of all he hated the helplessness.
Everyone told him he was lucky. Lucky he hadn't been killed veering off the road. Lucky he had veered off the road, instead of plowing into those kids. Lucky he hadn't choked on his own sputum. Lucky someone—no one had told him who—had found him that night, instead of the next morning, by which time, in his condition, he would have been dead of exposure.
He didn't feel very lucky, semi-prone in a bed at a permanent forty-five degree angle, with an I.V. line running a burning trickle of antibiotics into his bloodstream. An oxygen mask was clamped over his mouth and nose, buckled behind his head with a trick clasp that he still hadn't figured out. He suspected there was a piece missing. Whenever he brought up some of the sludge that was still smothering his lungs, he had to ring for a nurse to clean out the mask, or else sit there smelling the gunk for hours until one of them just happened to notice. He had a feeling he probably had an uncooperative patient warning on his chart.
The nozzle of a pulmonary surgeon had him on full bed rest, which meant that he wasn't even allowed to get up to use the head. It wasn't much of a problem, though, because he wasn't in any kind of mood to eat. He didn't care how much the nurses scolded him: he wasn't hungry. So they hooked up another I.V. and let him be. Yeah, there was almost certainly an uncooperative note on his chart. After five days no one was even arguing anymore. Which was a shame, because he was starting to feel better, and he was bored out of his wits, and there was nothing else to do.
The enforced inactivity had given him a lot of time to think things over. It was better if he and Elsa split up. He didn't understand how her mind worked, and she obviously wasn't interested in trusting him. In fact, she had made her opinion of him rather brutally pain. Really, why should she trust him? His body had derailed his attempt to cheat on her, but the intention was still there. As ridiculous as it seemed, Al found he did have strong feelings about adultery after all. Namely, if you were ready to sleep around, then you were ready to be single again.
A knock at the door surprised him. He turned his head as Jim Taggert entered, dressed in civvies and carrying an armload of papers. Jim smiled uncertainly.
"How're you doin', buddy?" he asked, approaching the bed with obvious trepidation.
"Peachy," Al rasped. His throat was raw from weeks of coughing, further aggravating the gravel quality of his voice. "What's this, they're restoring visiting privileges? Here I thought I wouldn't get those till after the first parole hearing."
Jim laughed a little. "They said you're sick," he explained.
"That's a filthy lie," deadpanned Al. "They've got me wired like the Six Million Dollar Man with minimal admissible evidence."
"Well, whatever's infectious it's not your sense of humor," Jim told him dryly. He pulled up a chair and set the papers on the bed-tray. "All the guys have been worrying about you."
Al scoffed. "You terminate their program, and the Air Force turn into a bunch of old women," he jeered. "Nothing to worry about, kid. Just a little chest cold."
"Pneumonia," Jim admonished. "People die from pneumonia."
"Sure, old men and babies," Al demurred. And almost an astronaut. The thought scared the hell out of him, so he brushed it off and turned the conversation on another target. "How's things?"
"Fine," Jim said. "Uh… Elsa hasn't been to visit, has she?"
"Not as such."
The kid looked genuinely sad about it. "I'm sorry. Everybody… well, we're starting to think she means it."
"I never doubted it," Al said.
"So you're not even going to try to keep her?"
Al shrugged. "She's her own person. She isn't mine to keep. I was trying to cheat on her the night they hauled me in." Jim looked stricken, so Al grinned and gestured broadly. "Doesn't matter. I'm going back to school, se if I can't cram a little more knowledge into this old brain."
"I know," Jim said. "A guy from the Navy stopped by the Cape saying you'd filed for permission. He sent these."
Jim swung the tray into Al's reach. He had brought a course calendar and application papers from M.I.T. Al smiled enormously, hampered only a little by the mask over his mouth.
"Thanks, kid," he said. "Give me something to do 'til I can get out of here."
"What do you want to study?" the young pilot queried.
"Computers," Al said. "Computers are the wave of the future. The coming thing. There's a lot of potential there."
There was a silence. "Isn't that kind of… ironic?" Jim asked.
"What?" Al said absently, flipping through the triplicate forms.
"Well, I mean, that's Elsa's thing, too, and…"
"Yeah, so when I outstrip her she can tell everybody she taught me everything I know. Do I care?" Al asked.
"Don't you?" said Jim.
"Nope," Al said brightly. "Time to move on. Isn't the first time I've started from scratch." He coughed a little. "Don't look so down, kid. Divorce isn't the end of the world."
Jim's expression clearly communicated that it would be for him. But then, Jim was married to his one true love. If he'd had to go through all this court stuff with Beth, Al reflected, he probably would've taken an electric drill to his temple months ago.
"Some couples are meant to be together forever," Al said. "Others are stops on the road."
"Elsa's a stop?"
"A Motel Six, at least," Al agreed. "She's not shedding any tears over the breakup. Why should I? It was our second try at happiness. We'll both be able to try again."
"You're unhappy?" Jim asked. He looked devastated. Good thing Apollo was done with: the kid was getting way too attached.
Al put on the largest grin he could dredge up. "Son, as long as a man has his pilot's license and his commission, he's got everything he needs to be happy," he said. "And let me tell you something about women. They're like flowers. Each one is a little different, sure, but fundamentally they're all the same. There's nothing you'll find in one that you can't find in another."
There was a long pause. Neither of them knew what to say: that much was blatantly obvious. Jim looked up at last, shifting uncomfortably.
"I… uh… I have to get back: Jeremy's got a doctor's appointment downtown, but I'll stop by tomorrow. Is there anything you want me to get for you? Anything at all?"
Al considered this carefully. There was one thing he needed, all right. He didn't especially want it, but he knew he needed it.
"As a matter of fact, kid, there is," he said. "Get me a lawyer."