They never really knew what happened to Clare Fellman.
One morning in late October she’d been conjugating the verb parler for her first-period students and suddenly, between first- and second-person present du sub-jonctif, she was on the floor, unconscious, all sensation and control (as she would discover, three days later, upon waking) gone from her body’s right side. Because they didn’t know what else to call it, after sending her off on numerous day trips through CAT scanners and MRI’s and the like, the doctors at Oschner called it a CVA.
She was twenty-two at the time. Now she was thirty-six.
Nothing much ever came back to that right side. Over the next year, first at Oschner, then at a rehab hospital near Covington, she had painstakingly learned again to reach and pick up things and hold on to them, to guide a spoon from lift-off to touchdown through the uncertain space between planets of bowl and mouth, to negotiate the fall between chair and bed and wheelchair and toilet, and finally to walk. Life had become all new conjunctions for her, she told me: impossible joinings and connections others took for granted. She still wears braces at knee and ankle, canvas with Velcro these days, and a slight drag in her gait shows the extra focus required whenever that side is called on. It reminds me, oddly enough, of the way a jazz player, confronted with straight eighth notes, instinctively drags them out into dotted eighths and sixteenths.
Her speech, too, bears the mark of having been relearned. She speaks slowly, carefully, as though each word carries in its wake its own small period, filling the spaces with quick smiles and, often, with laughter that seems as much at her own halting progress as at anything else.
We’d met a year or so back at an Alliance Francaise event, a special showing of a film version of L’Etranger and buffet dinner after, to which I’d gone with Tony (Antoine, but don’t dare use it) Roppolo, one of our English Department adjuncts. Absolutely guarantee you the stinkiest cheeses imaginable, Tony told me. And how could a guy pass up a thing like that?
Moments before the film began, Clare sank into the aisle seat beside me; Tony leaned forward for a quick hello and brief introduction. She held out her left hand and I took it, somewhat awkwardly, with my right. Afterwards we all sat at one of the long folding tables shuffling morsels of Cheshire, Brie and Camembert in among careful mouthsful of wine. By the time we’d switched from nouveau Beaujolais to a dark, ripe cabernet (Kool-Aid! she had exclaimed with her first sip of the Beaujolais) and Tony had washed out to sea (where periodically we caught sight of him bobbing here and there among bodies) Clare and I were well on our way to becoming (as she put it) new best friends.
For a time then, things moved pretty quickly, certainly far more quickly than made any kind of decent good sense. We were both old enough and, I’m sure, in our own ways damaged enough to know better. Nor did either of us, I think, really anticipate or intend what happened.
Then over the last couple of months, breathless and blinking, and with no clearer resolve or culpability than that with which we began, we’d found ourselves pulling back from one another. Too many unasked questions between us, maybe; too many wartime raids and too little faith in the cease-fire. Sometimes sitting beside Clare I felt as though unsaid things were growing like vines all around us, filling the room.
Of course, I felt that way with most of the people close to me.
And I was surprised, returning home from the Foucher shelter and my cemetery stroll, to find a message from her on my machine.
It’s Clare, Lew. The spaces between her words were chinked with the tape’s quiet hissing, anonymous background sounds. Yeah, me. I’m sorry to bother you. I know about LaVerne, and I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know. But I have a friend who’s got a problem, and I thought you might be able to help. A pause. Could you call me when you get a chance? Please?
She answered, breathing hard, after six or seven rings.
“Lew. Thanks for calling back. Give me a minute, okay? I was doing my rehab stuff.”
Threaded on the phone’s fine silver nerve, we hung there. I listened as her breathing slowed.
“Okay, thanks. I know this is a bad time.”
“Something about a friend, you said.”
“Sheryl Silva. She works in dietary at the school and usually takes her break when I do, right before lunchtime. For her it’s a little island of peace between preparation and storm. And after three straight periods, the last one my honors group, I’m pretty desperate. I try to stay away from the teachers’ lounge, which is mostly bitching and conversations about children or new refrigerators, neither of which I have or expect to. So there’d just be the two of us there in the lunchroom, and after a while we fell into the habit of sitting together. Though a lot of the time we wouldn’t say much of anything. Just sit there sipping iced tea, smiling vaguely at one another and looking out a window. Then last week she asks me if I’m ‘married or anything.’ I mean, we know absolutely nothing about one another. And when I tell her no, she asks me if I ever had a man beat me, or try to hurt me. Says she has, when I tell her no, but she thought that was all over.”
“And it isn’t.”
“I think it’s just threats, so far, from what she tells me.”
“Husband?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t too clear about that. They lived together, at any rate.”
“Lived. You sure we’re talking past tense here? Le passe simple?”
For a moment I was flooded with a sense of unreality, as though lights had dimmed and now I could see the stage set around me for the insubstantial, trumped-up thing it was, and knew the actors very soon must exit to stage-left lives of lunch meat, arrogant children, cars needing tires and new batteries. A cue card flipped up in the back of my mind; or a prompter whispered beyond the footlights. This is none of your business, Griffin, none of your business at all. But I had a longtime habit of ignoring scripted lines and improvising.
“Not for a while. I asked her what he’d done and she just looked at me. And then, after a minute, she said: Well, he put these dead chickens in my mailbox. And on the back porch. Just kind of hung them out there, like a string of peppers or garlic.”
“She black or white?”
“Latin.”
“Too bad. She be black, she know zackly what to do: fry them suckers.”
“Very funny, Lew. Maybe I should hang up and call Dr. Ruth instead. She probably knows a few tricks you can do with chickens.”
“Might read you her favorite salivious, I mean lascivious, passages from Frank Harris. Salacious? Man had a way with geese, as I recall.”
“Look, this is the thing: You can talk to him, make him see he’s heading for real trouble if this goes on.”
“Man to man, hm?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Well, Clare, I tell you. While it’s true I used to do that sort of thing once in a while, it’s also true that at the time I was twenty years younger and hadn’t been riding my buns and a desk for six years straight. Be like all those almost hairless guys from the sixties trying to make their comeback as rock and rollers, i.e., ludicrous. Besides, all my tie-dye’s at the cleaners.”
“Please, Lew. As a favor to me? How can you turn down a poor little crippled girl?”
“Oh. Well, since you put it like that.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“I’ll talk to the guy, Clare. Politely. And that’s all. He says boo, I’m a ghost.”
“You’re a jewel.”
But when I looked in the mirror afterwards it wasn’t sparkle I saw, more like a dullness that drew everything else to it. I remembered how old and used-up Walsh had looked to me the day of Verne’s funeral. I couldn’t be looking much better, and probably looked a hell of a lot worse. But enough of such reverie, I thought: there were things in the world that needed doing. Missions to be undertaken, wrongs to right, rights to champion.
Lew the Giant Killer.