A report of Thanksgiving; Pamela’s jealous husband; and miracles.

Pamela presided over Thanksgiving at her rented home on North Road, three houses east of a landmark known in Isle End as The Flash Gordon House. “Flash” Gordon had been a retired history professor from an Ohio college. When he was 90, he had saved the life of a popular local teenager about to commit suicide at the Wagner Estate out on the point. On that very same day, Gordon himself had died. So the Gordon House was not only a landmark, but also a shrine.

Pamela’s house was a typical Isle End Victorian with a wrap-around porch. Whitewashed stones lined a brick path up to the front steps. In front of the porch were hydrangea bushes and great rhododendrons heavily set with buds that would bloom in May. In November, squirrels were busy in the oak trees, shelling guests as we walked from our cars. On this cold gray day the house exhaled sweet and spicy breaths. As we entered her living room, Pamela gave us mugs of hot mulled wine with cinnamon swizzle sticks. Everyone from The Green Door was there except Angelo. I-Beam and I planted ourselves by the fireplace, dry logs snapping fragrantly. We were reliving yet again the last games of the World Series.

“Was it black or white magic?” I said, gulping a third mug of hot wine.

I-Beam agreed the Mets were an excellent team.

“No, I mean it –“

“You’re a quick drunk,” I-Beam said.

“It’s this wine.”

“But I thought it was French,” he said.

“Okay, needle me, but tell me the diff between magic and miracle then, and which one is the Mets?”

“Is that English?”

“My second language when I’m drinking,” I slurred.

“You could slow down.”

“Tastes too good. I’m warding off the cold.”

“You coming down with one? You sound funny. Southern.”

My Dixie accent was coming out under the influence. It was like a second head that popped out of my shirt if I wasn’t careful. Jenny had said that I spoke in a drawl in my sleep, and I had covered with some story about dreaming up a character for the play. This hadn’t been entirely a lie because I was back at work trying to write, and I did have a Southern character leading a Senate hearing.

“Maybe it’s Angelo’s cold,” I agreed. “His voice sounds like a piano after a flood. My mother got us a soaked piano when I was a kid and kept saying she could save it. Got a tuning fork and a ratchet to tighten the strings and all. She and my sister and I worked on that piano for two weeks. Finally had to give it away.”

I just stopped myself before saying, “to her cousin from Baton Rouge.”

Pamela re-entered the room. She looked like a suburban Demeter, goddess of the harvest: long kilt, ruffled red blouse, and a black cashmere vest that rounded over providential breasts. Her costume was completed by a white apron tied with a big bow at the back of her waist. She was carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres I began to hog.

“Leave some for others,” she scolded.

I turned to I-Beam. “You can’t just call Hernandez, Gooden, and Knight talent. I say miracle, not magic, because miracle shows us mortals how the gods play.”

“Who are you calling mortal?” I-Beam said.

Pamela’s perfume added to my inebriation. “Miracles don’t happen,” she said. “People make miracles.”

Then Liz Prager called her from the dining room, relaying info from the kitchen that pan drippings were ready to be made into gravy. Pamela rushed off, leaving the tray in my hands. Liz was playing the drunk sister in Albee’s A Delicate Balance, currently playing at The Green Door to positive, profitable reviews. This was a great relief after the season’s opener. Liz looked in character weaving about, gesturing with her drink in hand. Jenny, who played the dependent daughter Julia, went to the front door and let Angelo in. I was surprised to see him.

“You should’ve stayed home,” Jenny said.

“You’re better in bed than I am,” Angelo growled. His understudy, who had taken over his part in the Albee one acts that rotated with Balance, quickly presented Angelo with a mug of hot wine, presumably to dispel any thoughts that he was enjoying Angelo’s ill health.

Angelo joined I-Beam and me by the fire, standing closest to the blaze. He looked pretty white as he sipped at the wine.

“I’d have given you a ride if I’d known you were coming.”

“Don’t feed me straight lines, y’all,” he drawled.

“Did you watch Lowell today?” I asked.

Frank Marino came over to the fireplace, battling with a skewer of bacon-wrapped fish, peppers and mushrooms.

“You’re supposed to take them off the stick,” I suggested.

“Wise ass,” Frank said. “How you feeling, Brian?”

“Tired of playing audience for this Southern asshole, how ‘bout you?” he answered.

“You just want to read all the parts.”

“I’m discovering,” Angelo said, “that the line between genius and failure is not so effing fine.”

“Genius and failure. Sounds like our nation’s capital,” Frank said.

Angelo coughed, then sputtered, “Guns for hostages? Failure, Frank, pure failure. You see those Iranians shaking their fists at every camera, and in every effing fist, an American M-16.”

“Wait and see, wait and see,” Frank said. “It’s always easy to shoot down the guy on top. Right, I-Beam?”

I-Beam finished his drink and put the mug on the mantel. “I don’t say anything about politics. I paint and chip away at stone, and try to keep me and my mouth out of trouble.”

The lobby at The Green Door was testament to I-Beam’s philosophy. Several of his paintings on display were images of football players in action or in pain or at rest. One sculpture I coveted enough to steal was a black granite figure of a quarterback. His arm was pulled back like an arrow in a bow, ready to release a pass. In the granite base crouched another dark figure about to tackle him.

Frank tried with Angelo again, “You ever go hunting this time of year?”

“I’m Italian. Get effing real. My father – has a gun collection in his basement, ship, I could negotiate with the Ayatollah if my Pop’d give me the key to that effing gun case!”

Angelo bent into another coughing fit, and refusing any more wine, had to be steered into the kitchen for water. There Pamela was carving a turkey that could’ve floated in the Macy’s parade. Angelo downed the water and let I-Beam lead him upstairs to lie down before dinner by which time he’d fallen asleep. Pamela wouldn’t let anyone wake him up. Angelo’s flu had turned her plans for the Albee one-acts awry. She’d blasted away anyway with the understudy, but he couldn’t get the reviews Angelo would have.

At dinner, everyone talked about Lowell Syke’s soap opera and how my play was developing. Pamela accepted accolades for her cuisine, protesting each time she was praised how she’d done so much more in her domestic past. Around dessert, the telephone rang in the kitchen, and she excused herself. When she returned, no one asked what had reddened her face and wet her eyes. People cleared the table around her as she sat sipping coffee from a gold-edged cup. I joined her.

“Another superb Pamela Hall production,” I ventured. “You okay?”

“I’m very glad the Senator has a crime to hide,” Pamela said, speaking of my playwriting and ignoring my question. “The scene with the blackmailer also sounds good. I look forward to seeing the pages. Soon.”

“Who called?”

She hesitated but wanted to tell someone. “My ex.” She emptied her coffee cup. “I wish he hadn’t put Martin on the phone.”

“Who is –?”

Then she lifted a bottle of brandy, ignored the crystal snifters, and poured several fingers into her coffee cup. Given her hostessing formality, the action was a shock compounded by her drinking the brandy down in one long swallow.

“His son. My stepson. He’s fourteen. I love him.”

“Who? Whom? Which?”

“But he plans to visit. See The Green Door.”

“Who?”

“Next damn week,” Pamela said, standing.

“Who?” I repeated.

Pamela stood up. She only tapped the top of my head, but it felt like a hammer. My eyes hurt. My stomach rolled.

“Don’t worry,” she said, more to herself than to me, “I can handle it.”

“What?” I asked an empty table. I was dizzy.

Jenny returned to the dining room. She told me I looked funny.

I told her I just needed some fresh air.

The next thing I knew, we were in a touch football game on Pamela’s huge back lawn bordered by scrub woods like those around I-Beam’s house. I started feeling a little better when I-Beam came out to play, joined by Jeff, the lighting man, black Paul and Laura’s three teenaged sons, plus Liz Prager’s boys and their father. Jenny, of course, jumped into the game, pulling Frank Marino and several others along.

Frank said, “I’ll show you,” as he reached up to shove I-Beam’s cornerstone of a shoulder.

It became immediately clear that we were all out there just to watch I-Beam move, part the air around himself in Moses-waves. He could touch anyone he wanted to, but it was always just a touch, never tackle, as some of the kids and I forgot from time to time. We stopped and fell down laughing at the sight of Jenny actually climbing I-Beam to reach for the ball in his upheld hand. He passed it off to me when Jeff was running straight for me, and I shifted it to Frank, who ran with it behind Jenny’s blocking (mainly her screaming and waving her arms, but she was a fast runner) – and we won! Jenny did cartwheels and Frank stroked his belly, saying, “Not so bad for an old plumber.”

I walked off into the woods and threw up. It was a great Thanksgiving except for the phone call.

I think Pamela was watching from the window.

I had just turned 13 when I was taken on a family trip to California. My parents preferred the cool north, a vacation from our sultry climate, but I disliked the grotesque acacia trees leaning out over the Pacific. They looked like witch skeletons whose prey had eluded their grasp. Then Disneyland was an insult to my adolescent sensibility. I couldn’t admit I wanted to return to Adventureland. My parents felt guilty for dragging me on a trip I was enduring poorly.

“Either I trail after you two here or after Sister in Europe,” I said ungratefully. “You don’t let me go anywhere alone.”

I stopped being such a rectal pain when we arrived in Los Angeles. The fiery wind, the Santa Ana, was blowing. My parents were ready to leave immediately, but since I was finally enthusiastic, they relented. What did I like so much about the ultimate heat? It was the pure hellishness. A City in a Desert. The fire-breathing Santa Ana could have ignited stone building into spontaneous combustion (thereby refuting a bullying 7th grade science teacher I’d had). It was Fire Season on the TV news. We didn’t get to see fires in person, but we could see pillars of smoke in the sky and smell ash in the wind.

A tour bus through Beverly Hills revealed no hillbillies but several movie stars taking out their garbage. I sat by the bus window, embarrassing my parents by yelling at the actors, “Where are the servants?” I was reminded of movie stars the week after Thanksgiving in Isle End, at a Friday afternoon rehearsal at The Green Door for A Streetcar named Desire. That’s when I met Pamela’s ex-husband, Thomas Paul Wasley.

He was about 6’4”, not as tall as I-Beam nor as big, but a fine specimen of Brooks Brothers Man. He looked like one of those movie stars minus a moustache. He had blue eyes, wavy black hair, and a face that couldn’t decide between perfect symmetry and character. Straight from his office in the City, on The Street, he wore a dark suit and rep tie. He said he planned to stay for the weekend.

“Where?” I asked.

We were standing in the lobby within earshot of a rehearsal that would end soon because they’d need time to get ready for the evening’s performance of A DELICATE BALANCE. Pamela had asked me to wait around “for Tom to arrive,” and not to let him disturb her while she worked. No more faithful Argus than I to her Penelope; I certainly felt like growling at her suitor.

I tried to divert Wasley with descriptions of I-Beam’s artwork on the lobby walls, and he was a polite listener. I also tried to keep from empathizing with him. It wasn’t working; he had no apparent faults, and he obviously was desperate to see Pamela. He was even worse off than I was. The tragic jerk had had her and lost her.

“Where,” I repeated, “are you staying in Isle End? I live over the bakery.”

“At the Inn,” he said, looking past me at the closed white doors to the auditorium and stage.

“Don’t order the swordfish,” I told him, “unless you eat shark. The swordfish is purely shark.”

“Pamela is preparing dinner.”

“She’s some cook. You’ve should’ve seen Thanksgiving.”

“I’ve seen a few.”

I considered burying us both alive in small talk, but at that moment, Pamela Hall ex-Wasley appeared. In costume. For the first time since I’d met her, she was in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a horrible hank from which strands fell at peculiar angles.

“Did I forget to invite you to dinner?” Pamela asked me. “I’ve got so many things going on at once, things slip my mind!” She didn’t allow Wasley to kiss her hello. “Old play, new play, young playwright,” she kept yammering for Blue Eyes.

Wasley looked at me with new understanding. He hadn’t known what the hell I did around the theatre. For all he knew, I was the guy who polished the black and white tiles in the lobby and told visitors about the gallery display. Now he had me pegged as The Young Playwright and, to Pamela, maybe something more. I eagerly auditioned for the part by lying, “Oh, no, Pamela, you invited me on Monday or Tuesday, it was. It’s been my priority all week.”

“I’ll drive,” Wasley offered.

“No,” Pamela said, “we all have separate cars.”

We followed her out of the lobby, the long way ‘round to the parking lot. Evidently, she didn’t want to take Wasley through the theatre. Maybe she didn’t want to introduce him to everyone. There’d be all those feminine sighs and afterwards, questions like how could she have let him go? I was grateful not to bear comparison to the paragon. Also, I was curious about the evening’s ensuing drama in which I’d suddenly been called on to play a role.

Ah, the beauty of the triangle! Where in Nature did we find it more purely than in affairs of the human heart? Was there a triangle in a tree? Mushrooms were known to grown in circles, not triangles. The ocean was no triangle, nor a bird’s wing, or any mountain peak. For these we had the word fractal. I thought of our genesis on the vast African plain, the chatter of our cousins the monkeys, the roar of thunder and lion, the long black night lightened only by circles of moon and sun. Where was the triangle born, but in the human mind? William James said, My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. The triangle freed us from fractal Nature, from the nearly infinite series of curves from first finger to opposable thumb. It was created by adding one mental line from mother’s scalene cradling of her newborn, from hand to shoulder; it began there in, and defined, love.

This was a meditative riff I did not give at dinner. Thomas Paul Wasley and I sat facing each other while Pamela hid in her kitchen. She had given us drinks and hors d’oeuvres left over from Thanksgiving and told us to sit down, it wouldn’t be a moment. That moment was stretching out into what felt like eternity. I had sworn to myself that if there were going to be conversation, I wasn’t going to help.

Wasley appeared far too preoccupied to notice my hostility. Pamela was clearly not giving him an inch. Whatever he had come for, he was not going to get. But I sensed tenacity in him; he came from old Pilgrim stock. He descended from those fanatics who had risked their own and their children’s lives to cross the 17th century Atlantic at the beginning of winter. 17.6% of all CEO’s of American corporations were from his tribe. In 1950, 33% of the top corporations had been run by Wasley’s people, who then as now made up only about 2% of the U.S. population. A Fortune magazine economic survey had graphed out the impressive world of the Wasleys. I hadn’t been sure whether I was impressed or oppressed.

His tribe had held out 80% of the wealth of the world’s richest nation against the immigrant invasions of 300 years. What was one woman banging around in an Isle End kitchen against evolution and history… unless you considered she came from the same stock and was making an awful racket in there.

“Arthur,” she called, “could you come help me a minute?”

I stood, drink in hand, ready to serve. “Have you ever thought,” I asked Wasley, “that the mink-coated pudenda might have been the original inspiration for the triangle?”

From the expression on his face, I could see that he had not.

Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after irregular phenomena, William James said, and I could see I was being presented with some irregularities. In the kitchen, Pamela (who had told us she was going upstairs to change) was still in blue jeans and pink-emblem gray sweatshirt. Nothing was bubbling on the stove. All the pots in the kitchen, it appeared, had flung themselves onto the counters and center table. Pamela stood in the midst of this chaos, looking wildly for something to materialize. She unnerved me.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“I have no eggs.”

“How long did it take you to find that out?”

“What will we do?”

“We?”

“What will we do?”

“Breathe. This is a tourist town in the off season – restaurants will rejoice to receive us.”

“I’m not hungry,” Pamela whispered. “I think I am going to throw up.”

“Old Tom also looks none too peckish. I made a meal of the hors d’oeuvres.”

Pamela’s eyes filled with tears.

“What’s the sweatshirt logo,” I asked, pointing.

“Vassar. My alma mater. It’s my lucky sweatshirt.”

“No evidence of that. You’ve got to go into the dining room and put the beast out of his misery. Make new plans –“

“No! I don’t want to see him tomorrow, or ever, again!”

“He probably heard that.

“But I don’t hate him,” Pamela returned to whispering.

I went to the sink and filled a glass of water for her. She took a courtesy sip and I emptied the glass. “Well, we can’t just leave him sitting out there.”

“I know. I don’t know what to do.”

“How about I leave, and you two – ”

“No! You can’t leave,” she said and started to cry, a hurricane of tears and shaking shoulders and sobs, right out of Lowell Syke’s soap opera.

I tried patting her back and telling her it would all be all right. Her wails were subsiding by the time the kitchen door swung open and Wasley entered. This was not the scene he most wanted to see; it was the only moment of those that followed that I enjoyed.

“Pamela,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She backed away from both of us. “You knew you upset me when you called last week.”

“I can’t help myself.”

I looked at my hands to see if I were wearing the Ring of Giges, which would have explained my sudden total invisibility. I wished for momentary blindness as well because it was awful to watch Wasley do his humble-humble act. The woman had to be made of bronze not to melt.

“We cannot go back,” Pamela said.

“Martin misses you.”

“I miss him.”

“I miss you.”

It was like watching chess being played with all pawns.

Pamela left the kitchen. I was biting my upper lip and resuming visibility; Wasley said, “You still here? Does she want you?”

Opting for decency, I said, “You’ve got it all wrong.”

Wasley went through the motions of looking to make coffee, and I found the tin in the freezer where Pamela kept it. “You certainly know your way around here,” he said.

You can’t tell the truth to an ex-husband who doesn’t want to be an ex. Nevertheless, I attempted, “Showfolk are very close. Pamela is always feeding us.”

“You don’t act like showfolk.”

I heard the threatening compliment. “Well, I am a playwright.”

The coffee machine’s popping and dripping then became music to this libretto:

“You’re on The Street,” I said.

“Right.”

“Interesting?”

“Yes.”

The coffee pot filled, and the room smelled good. I was very hungry. In the refrigerator, I found, among many other things, two dozen eggs. I began scrambling some.

“You know the Magritte of the men in derbies falling out of the sky like raindrops?”

“Yes,” Wasley said.

“I guess a guy like you has to beat them off with clubs.”

“I’ve always gotten what I wanted.”

“Where does Martin come in?”

“My first marriage was a casualty of the war.”

“Vietnam?”

“Yes.”

“What war killed the second marriage? Pamela can be intense,” I said

I wondered if eggs would prefer to be thought of as scrambled rather than beaten.

“She’s very good at everything she does,” Wasley agreed.

“I didn’t say good. I said intense.” I plated my eggs and took a big bite. “You want some?” I offered.

“I love her,” Wasley said.

“She appears – conflicted.” I downed several bites. “Anyway, pal, why don’t you just leave for now?”

I regretted pal the second it was out of my mouth.

“And leave her to you?”

Guilty bravado — and the eggs — gave me nerve. “Yeah,” I said, “why not?”

He slammed his coffee mug down on the table so hard it broke and spilled coffee all over the floor. I’d recoiled from the loud noise of shattered stoneware, but not fast enough — his big right hand ringed fist caught me hard on the cheekbone. When I fell or slipped on the pool of coffee on the floor, the back of my head cracked against a counter edge just at its corner.

I lost consciousness. When I came to, my head and face hurt like hell. My scalp was wet and hot: the unmistakable metal smell of blood running down the back of my neck into my new oxford shirt. I was swearing as I opened my – only one eye opened. Pamela’s face filled a portrait-size view. I babbled, “Spend $40 on a shirt and this is what happens.”

Then I felt a calm like a fog settle over me. Through it, I looked into Pamela’s green eyes. “At least he didn’t hit my jaw,” I said.

She ignored me. “He’s going to need stitches,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t move him.”

Wasley was looking in the freezer for something cold to put on my closed eye. “He’s conscious. He’ll be fine.”

“Away from you,” Pamela said, helping me up.

“I don’t want stitches. The bleeding stopped,” I lied.

“You don’t know what you need,” Pamela murmured near my ear.

“I need to get the hell out of here,” I said, stumbling toward my jacket in the living room.

Pamela kept up with my unsteady pace and easily stopped me at the front door. “You can’t leave,” she begged.

“Look, if I stay, Pamela, I’m going to have to hit him, and then he’ll kill me.”

“You just lie down upstairs. Just stay in the house.”

“I don’t understand — .”

“We’ve been terrible to you, and there isn’t one good reason for you to stay except — I’m afraid to be alone with him.”

“Well, now I know why.”

“No, no, he never hit me. He never would hit me. He’s a gentleman. A gentle man.”

“Yes, he sold Girl Scout cookies to the Viet Cong.”

“See, you’re okay. You’re funny. I want you to stay.” She leaned forward and kissed me.

My arms never moved from my sides. When we stopped, she took a step back and looked over her shoulder upstairs where evidently I was intended to locate a bed.

“Why don’t you just tell him to get lost?”

“I can’t. He won’t.”

“And when I get to be 37 – if I get through tonight – will I suddenly understand all this?”

Pamela took my jacket over her arm. Wasley appeared with an icepack she accepted from him and placed against my cheek. I trudged upstairs and found a bedroom. I hadn’t finished my eggs, never got a cup of coffee. I was being sent to bed without my supper and after a hell of a spanking. What would the great American philosopher William James have said about this? Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with them.

I woke in the dark. I was very cold and my head throbbed. The oil burner in the basement was shivering. The house shook as the first blast of real Arctic air that season hit Isle End. I felt around for a table, then a lamp, and turned it on. I saw then that I was under a blanket topped by a comforter that matched the floral striped wallpaper. Despite both layers of covers, I was shaking, and I felt I was bleeding into a matching pillowcase. I couldn’t open my left eye. The ice pack had slid onto the wooden floor, but the air felt cold enough to replace it. I didn’t think I could take the pain of reaching, anyway. The house was silent except for the oil burner’s rumbling, but soon the loud knocking of metal pipes and hiss of steam from the large iron radiator in a dormered eave played together like a trio.

Then a telephone rang down the hall. It cut like knives in my ears. I hadn’t felt this bad after the street fight in Paris, and then I certainly hadn’t felt like such a jerk. Four of us had been going home late from a bar, loud and drunk, when some teenagers from a 50’s delinquent movie jumped us. I don’t know how many of them there were, more than us was all, and there was plenty of John Wayne-swinging and cursing. After I landed a few angry punches, I’d felt only the see-saw of infuriating blood and leaden muscle lassitude. And when I connected with an attacker’s jaw, the adrenalin-pumped fury sublimed into erotic pleasure. His punch that loosened my teeth and jaw didn’t knock me unconscious, it just staggered me against a wall. I caught some breath and propelled myself back against the s.o.b. and hit him harder than I knew I could. He fell down and didn’t get up. When they ran away and left the four of us standing or leaning against the buildings in the narrow street, we spat our blood on the ground and felt like heroes. The disapproving remarks of the medecins in a clinic in no way penetrated our macho armor. The next morning, I woke up jaw-wired, muscle-stiff, but proud and cocky.

Now I was lying in a flowered bedroom down the hall from the bed and Hall I’d earned and would rather be in, listening to Wasley’s voice answer the telephone and turn away so his voice was muted. I had to strain to hear him say, “Wrong number.”

But it got Pamela out of bed, padding in thick socks down the hallway to me.

“Wrong number,” she repeated as she entered the room and sat down on a chair beside the bed. “Some woman calling about the hospital Emergency Room— ”

“What woman?”

Both of us heard the pain in my voice, and Pamela must’ve seen my blood ruining her pillowcase. She called to Wasley.

He looked sorry, then worried, then something stranger. “We do have to get him to an ER,” Wasley said.

“Get that – him – away from me,” I tried to yell, but it came out as a yelp.

They both ignored my protestations. Wasley easily lifted me out of the bed. He drove us in his giant Lincoln to Port Wagner Hospital. We arrived about 4 in the morning.

In the waiting room, the receptionist sent me in right away as if I were expected. There were no windows. Individual compartments were defined by short white curtains around bare-mattressed beds. When I was led toward one, a nurse quickly made it up with a half sheet so my legs touched clear plastic mattress cover. Around a central island oval desk, several doctors, nurses, and technicians busied themselves. A hospital bell kept dinging some incessant series of semiphoric messages, meaningful to staff ears, painful to mine. A black technician took my blood away in a big test tube. I figured that was a good sign. No one was worried by how much I’d lost already. I was giddy.

Another woman asked me questions about my medical history. I asked her how long she had worked in the ER, and did she prefer it to other places in the hospital?

“Nothing wrong with your mouth, honey,” she said.

“Slice in the head,” I turned to show her. “Fever, nausea, lots of pain. Aural hallucination. I was unconscious. Possibility of fracture or concussion. My father is a doctor.”

Then my nurse backed away, as if at the approach of Pharoahic royalty. The doctor who examined me didn’t smile. Her probing of the cut hurt.

“X-ray, stat,” she ordered, and two skinny guys pushed a gurney my way, lifted me like a bag of charcoal via the half sheet. I was sped me away, the gurney-men telling jokes to each other in Spanish and cracking each other up.

When I was rolled back from the nasty grey X-ray room, I waited a long time before Lady Lancet returned to sew up my scalp. She lifted up the black x-ray film and examined my Happy Halloween skull. Casually, she asked me things like my name and address. She could read x-rays, but I could read her as if I’d written her lines and stage directions.

“Hans Castorp, The Magic Mountain,” I answered.

“No fracture,” she said, indifferently.

“Sorry,” I said.

Her eyes focused momentarily somewhere on the bridge of my nose. She touched the bruise on my cheekbone, but only en route to parting my swollen eye. Her touch was gentle, but the pain made me gasp, then groan. Her face came close to mine. I could smell her peppermint breath. I lacked the depth perception that two eyes would’ve given me of her breasts moving in rhythmic waves. I looked anyway.

“Much pain?” she asked.

“Enough.”

“Tough guy,” she said. “Looks like a 10 to me. I’ll give you something for that. And a shot before I sew you up. Anything else?”

She’d been examining my swollen eye with a light pen that outlined tree branches, the retina or blood vessels or something gagging-else inside eyes. They have always reminded me of fried eggs that would spill the yellow at a fork’s prod.

“It looks all right,” the doctor said. “We’ll call Ophthalmology to be sure. You sure got someone angry at you, didn’t you?”

“I’m not pressing any charges if that’s what you mean. I don’t know about paying for a specialist—”

She patted my hand, the one not attached to an i.v. dripping clear liquid into me, antibiotic and hydration. I’d asked.

The doctor said, “Everything is taken care of. You’re the Merling Man.”

A large black nurse arrived with a cart covered with medieval torture tools that had horrified me from childhood in my father’s office. She handed the doctor a threaded curved sewing needle and picked up an anesthetic syringe.

“This will stick a bit,” the nurse said as I leaned like a child into her great bosom.

I saw lights behind both eyes when she stuck me, but thereafter, the doctor could have trepanned my skull and I would have felt nothing. After stiffening too long from pain, my body relaxed. I was suddenly exhausted and sad and relieved. The nurse’s wide maternal embrace moved me. I missed my mother who had died when I was 16. The nurse smelled clean and earthy; some sense memory sent me a whiff of my mother’s perfume. By the time I was sewed up, I was more asleep than awake.

“We’re going to keep you overnight for observation,” the doctor seemed to mumble. “I’m going to order a bed for you.”

When I looked up, the nurse was looking down at me, smiling with those white eyes in a black face that rang church bells from my childhood.

“You can cry, honey,” she said.

I coughed. “The people who brought me here?—“

The doctor said, “Yes. They’ve been informed. You had a mild concussion. You need to take it easy and stay in bed.”

“Always a good idea,” I thought I said aloud.

I may have been given some pills to swallow; I shut my eye and remembered nothing until late the following day when I was awakened by Pamela Hall’s entrance into my hospital room. Wasley stood in the doorway at a safe distance. I imagined I resembled the Norman Rockwell Revolutionary War bandaged drummer boy. Pamela kept shaking her head, and Wasley looked stony. She arranged my release, and they drove me back to the Four Star Bakery and put me in bed upstairs.

Pamela said, “I’m sorry, Arthur, I just couldn’t lift you without his help.”

Wasley said nothing. She made sure I took the drugs the hospital pharmacy had given her, and I began to feel no pain. Vivid memory of that kiss at her front door returned, keeping me up until the pills knocked me out.

Angelo woke me with his improved coughing. He still had a low fever, but it wasn’t “effing enough to keep from rehearsing Streetcar,” or out of the performance of one-acts that night. He made a pot of coffee before he left around 2 in the afternoon. Pamela Hall called me an hour after he’d left, from The Green Door.

“Did Wasley leave?” I asked.

“Yes. He was terribly sorry.”

“He coming back?”

“Martin’s coming in April for a visit,” she finally said. “I have some good news for you.”

“You’ve got a kinky thing for one-eyed men?”

“I’ll be over later with the dinner I owe you and tell you then.”

“Please,” I said, “no eggs.”

I moved in and out of sleep and semi-wakefulness peppered with throbbing pain. My mind was a crowded Orly Aeroport of arrivals and departures. I could sometimes hear distinct voices. One stratum of my consciousness told me I had fever. Another said I was a child home from school and sleeping in a warm bed within earshot of a radio or TV on in another room. I also thought: getting punched out for a woman, however desirable she was, should give a person pause.

Travel along these mental pathways always led upwards toward pain at which point I would open my eyes, gauge the time of day from the light, and close them quickly to sink back into the warm pea soup of daydream. The pain was a real boundary, a landmark that kept me from what really frightened me at the bottom, under the warm ooze.

I didn’t know what it was. Being hit by Tom Wasley hadn’t scared me, nor being jumped by the Parisian hoods. Sure, heartbeat responded to adrenalin surge, but it had been followed by a canny strategic sense and camaraderie among my friends. When Tom swung to hit me, I’d no time to duck, but the thought hadn’t occurred to me. I wasn’t scared of him or the pain of bone on bone – I was just surprised. There was no reason for him to hit me, and that had made it seem impossible for him to do it.

Bleeding into Pamela’s pillowcase had scared me. That was the fear at the bottom of things, and I quickly surfaced and opened my good eye. The room reassured me. I could rely on matter; things, unlike people, rarely disappointed me. Things were always there, the stone wall to bang my head against and stop, telling me that pleasure was the absence of pain. What scared me was that something of me was seeping into a foreign element. Water mingling with land … the zones where opposites meet… these were true terrors.

I looked across the room at the small corkboard I’d put on the wall. On it, I’d tacked notices about Green Door performances and newspaper reviews. I’d highlighted every place that Pamela’s name appeared. There was also the corner of an envelope with my sister Carole’s address; I had to remember to send her a postcard with a view of Main Street so I could circle the window above the bakery where my head currently throbbed. I-Beam’s telephone number was tacked onto the board, and the number in East Hampton I was supposed to call when Angelo didn’t show up for rehearsal.

When I shut my eyes, I saw reds and yellows that focused into spots. Then the circles and blocks of color lined up in parallel lines and a Stonehenge circle. I felt like a TV receiver with incoming messages. I was hearing as well as seeing things in my head, but they felt like they were coming to me from outside.

The words – sounds – Carnac and Karnak — repeated in a feminine voice in my ear. I could see triple screens at once, as if I were standing beside the video producer in a dark control room, viewing the temple at Karnak, Egypt, and the stones arranged in Carnac, Brittany. One screen was black velvet with red and yellow shapes blinking on and off; the other two were like old home movies, travel slides of Egypt and northern France, complete with voiceovers from someone else’s vacation. I could feel it was supposed to have some significance for me, but I was too stupid to understand.

Then a different voice said maybe these were views of lives I had lived before as a builder or architect at both sites. An amused voice suggested I’d seen too many Late Nights with Johnny Carson wearing his turban as The Amazing Karnac. Someone complained that I knew too much about cromlechs and menhirs and Amon-Ra to trust the pro-reincarnation voice. I was agreeing with the Complainer when two things happened: I saw a woman in a green cloak walking among the Carnac stones, and she turned to wave to me. I couldn’t see her face, as hard as I tried.

Second thing: I heard knocking at a door, which reminded me of the third act of MACBETH. That’s when I opened my eyes and saw both my arms were straight up in the air. One dropped to my side and the other to my hot forehead, trying to press away the pain. I called, “Come in!”

Angelo had been driven back to Isle End by Pamela. With them was a tall, older man I recognized as the publicist we had met on the night The Little Foxes had opened at The Green Door. I struggled out of bed to greet them and wrapped a cotton bathrobe around me that was all I needed even in early December. Living above a bakery, it was warm through the floor. Pamela suggested we go out to dinner: I turned green.

“When’s the last time you had anything for the pain?” she asked.

“Probably four hours ago. The pills have the added benefit of sending me on legal head trips. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Angelo sat down on the sofa. He looked worse than I did, thinner and pale, but not coughing. As if he read my mind, he said, “You look like ship warmed over, too.”

Pamela protested we both looked fine.

“Not to worry,” Angelo said to her. “Tell him his good news, and I’ll tell him my bad.”

“What bad news?” I said.

“I’m outta The Green Door. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I gotta do something about finding out. Let’s get effing real here. I’m 28 years old. You don’t have a cold for 3 months when you’re 28 unless you’ve got something wrong.”

“It’s just a leave,” Pamela said.

Mr. Olds, Roy Olds, had taken a seat at the kitchen table. “We won’t stay long,” he said. “These two look like they could both use a rest.”

Pamela agreed as Angelo said, “You’ve made the big time, just like effing Lowell.” He leaned back into the sofa. “Both Arena and the Guthrie are doing your Green and Golden Girl.”

I looked at Pamela and then Mr. Olds. “Arena, D.C.?”

Mr. Olds smiled and nodded. He was a white-haired man with wrinkles finely etched all over his ruddy face, like a clean-shaven Santa.

“How’d they hear about my play?” I said, at which moment my legs turned to rubber.

I had to sit down at the table across from Mr. Olds and accept a cup of strong tea that Pamela brewed. She gave one also to Angelo, and he sipped at it noisily.

“That’s my happy department,” Mr. Olds eventually answered. He handed me one of his publicist cards. But my eyes weren’t focusing well. My heart, however, was receiving messages loud and clear.

“There’s also Broadway, tell him about Broadway,” Angelo said.

“Well, that’s still in the works,” said Mr. Olds.

“If I’m asleep, don’t wake me,” I said.

“No one is going to pinch you,” Pamela said.

“I’m working on a consultant basis exclusively these days, Arthur,” Mr. Olds said jovially. “I was at JWT a good 30 years of good work and better luck, and now, also, Esther Merling is a neighbor of mine.”

“J-W-T?” I asked.

“J. Effing Walter Thompson Advertising Agency,” Angelo translated. “The biggest effing ad agency in the effing world!”

“There’s an unfriendly takeover going on,” Mr. Olds explained. “We call it the Second American Revolution because ‘the British are coming,’” he paused. “In any event, what this has done, regarding my small sphere of influence, was expedite an inevitable retirement. And consulting, I have learned, has a wonderful variety of benefits.”

Mr. Olds stood. He was even taller than the first time I’d seen him. I wondered if he was growing.

“I – I, what do I have to do?” I stammered.

He looked down at me and put his hand on my shoulder. He winked at the paper mess on the table. “Just follow your star,” he said.

Pamela followed Mr. Olds out, admonishing me to take my pills and look after Angelo. I sat staring at nothing, an image from the early afternoon haunting me. I kept seeing that green cloak flaring in a Brittany wind. I wished I’d seen that woman’s face. I turned to look at Angelo instead.

“Well, we’re a pair,” I said.

“A pair of what?”

“I’ll take you over to Port Wagner Hospital. I know the way.”

“You don’t know this from that, genius,” he said, indicating vital body parts. “Drive with those pills in you? My father’s coming out here tomorrow to pick me up. He’s driving me into the City. ”

“Oh. Okay. Just don’t let him talk you into pouring cement for a living again. You’re a really good actor.”

“What a pity-ef you are,” Angelo said. He pushed himself up and off the sofa and started walking toward the bathroom.

“You’re a really good actor,” I repeated as he closed the bathroom door, “You really effing are!”

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About Lois Bassen: Lois Bassen just won the Atlantic Pacific Press 2009 Drama Prize, and in the past a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship for an alternative history novel, German Sabbath, about the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler on the day after the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934. She has been published in many lit magazines (Kenyon Review, American Scholar, etc.) and online (Minnetonka, Conteonline, The Externalist, etc.). A Vassar grad, she has been married for 42 years, has two adult daughters (a doctor and a teacher), and recently moved from NYC to Rhode Island. She is a prizewinning, produced, and published playwright (Samuel French, MONTH BEFORE THE MOON, NEXT OF KIN at New York's ATA, 2 other plays in OH, NC), and commissioned co-author of a WWII memoir by the young Scottish bride of Baron Hajime Kawasaki (THISTLE & CHRYSANTHEMUM).