I started with Lugano here and ended up somewhere way different. How quickly can a piece of writing move the reader from one place to another without it feeling too much like cosmic whiplash? I think this might be a little too fast, but maybe just by a hair. I guess my central concern is: can we follow writers into fantastic or exemplary spaces and then back into the realm of the everyday? I guess it depends if we’re equally willing to admit that the exemplary means both the exception to the rule, and the rule itself.
“I used to wake up before you and throw open the shutters on the balcony. In the earliest part of the days in June, you couldn’t see out to the furthest peaks it would be so bright. Golden and new and sharp. The clay roofs below and the white steeple from the small church on via Collina in sharp relief close to the window—and the cypresses. A warm wind would come up from the city then.”
Helen put a little more lather over the last place that she had missed. Dabbed it with her left index finger and then stretched the skin on his cheek by spreading with her thumb and middle finger. It still seemed ludicrous to be giving him such a close shave. When she passed the blade over the spot, the skin shone, damp and smooth.
“But by late August, you could already see the snow on the farthest peaks over the lake after some of the chilliest nights. Nights where the thunderstorms would strike that one mountain over and again, and you would call to me from bed to come away from the balcony. But I couldn’t get enough of those strikes. And then the slow velvety sound of the thunder rumbling and rolling in from the south, over the mountains from Italy, as if lazily finishing the final miles of a long trek.”
She found herself waving the razor around. She put it down on the bedside table.
“But what was the name of that mountain?” She could never remember it. “Something with an S. SS ssssss SSSSSSStephano.sseebastion…Simonnne. Oh I forget.”
Helen wiped his face with the towel and kissed him on the cheek, catching a brief whiff of the lotion and stroked back his thin gray hair. She had gotten very good in the past few months, and no longer left little dabs of blood coming up from his chin.
“Why could you never figure out how to do it this well?” she had asked him once, holding his chin with her thumb and finger, and turning his face side to side. He had stared blankly at her. Though his expression never changed, it often seemed that she could make his face say what she wanted it to. She could elicit apologies, questions, even a smile.
Imagined, all.
She sat down in a chair in the corner of the room to wait for the nurse.
“Oh, you don’t mind do you?” she said. “Maybe I should pour myself a drink? Well now if you insist, I’ll stay for awhile,” she said. “I just have to pick up a few things at the grocery store, anyway. Catherine is coming over tonight with the boys, so I have to make a big dinner.”
Only in the silences did she hear the ventilators and the beeps, the shuffling footsteps in the hall, feel the smell of ammonia in her nose. She rubbed her hands together.
The good nurse came in the room. The blonde one who actually checked his chart when she came into the room. He had bitten the brunette one while she was changing his catheter a few weeks before—a fleeting sign that he still had a temper at least. But more worrisome, a sign that something may have happened before, when Helen wasn’t in the room to watch.
“Mr. Brownstein, it looks like you got a shave,” she said. She looked at Helen, who smiled.
“He’s a lousy tipper,” she said.
“But a handsome lousy tipper,” said the good nurse.
“Well, don’t let that face fool you into anything,” said Helen. She wondered if that needed explaining, but left it hanging in the air.
“Are you staying with us this afternoon, Mrs. Brownstein?” the good nurse asked. Helen had to remember her name. She just had to get it from the head nurse on the floor sometime.
“No. No, dear. I was just keeping him company till someone came by. I should get going.”
She pushed off against the arms on the chair, and the good nurse came over to help her. Helen had stopped protesting these gestures. She assumed that kindness motivated the over-anxious nurses—the good one and almost everyone else seemed compelled to help with doors and chairs, and asked chipper questions about the weather. Catherine said something about insurance policies and hospital liability. Helen had just waved her hand, unable to pinpoint the origins of the sudden cynicism in her daughter.
“Okay, Mrs. Brownstein,” said the good nurse after Helen had made it to her feet.
She went over to her husband and touched his smooth skin.
“I’ll see you in the morning with Catherine,” she said. “Behave yourself.” She looked at the good nurse and walked out of the room.
She remembered to stop at the Nurses’ station and stood in the reception area.
“Can I help you?” asked a middle-aged woman wearing half-glasses, without looking up from the file that she was reading.
“Yes, I was wondering if I could get the name of the nurse working with Gene Brownstein on this floor, please?”
“If you’d like to file a complaint, ma’am, you need to speak with the administration department on the first floor in the east wing,” said the nurse. She still hadn’t looked up from the file.
“I’m sorry?” said Helen.
The nurse looked up and talked louder. “Ma’am if you need assistance filing a complaint with one of the floor nurses, we can get someone to help you.”
Helen suddenly felt flushed, and didn’t know what to say. She had made a mistake. She didn’t want to file a complaint. And why did the nurse assume this? Was the brunette nurse that her husband had bitten the rule? Was he suffering in the hands of people who got complained about by other equally desperate looking gray-haired wives who came just to shave their withering husbands?
“Never mind,” she said, angry and embarrassed at once. “I’ll just ask her again the next time I see her.”
The nurse looked befuddled and shrugged. She looked back down at her paperwork and Helen turned to the elevator.
The bell rang and the door opened. She stepped forward. Someone had already pressed “L.” The elevator rumbled down, and Helen felt her heart beating.
San Salvatore, she thought to herself. The lighting struck San Salvatore on those June nights when she would climb into bed and laugh while Gene stored himself back to sleep.
