Bleeding Hearts(136)

“I think you’ve got a tour to do in just a couple of weeks.” Simon was still frowning. “And the television appearances. And the ad campaign. We can’t afford to have you out of commission right this minute.”

“I know that, Simon. I’m not out of commission.”

“We can’t afford to have you out of commission permanently, either. Maybe you ought to see a doctor tomorrow even if your leg doesn’t hurt.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Magda stood up and leaned against the leg again. It felt a little better, except when she put all her weight on it. Then the pain started up all over again. She sat back down on the balustrade and tried to do some calf flexes. Those hurt, too.

“I wonder what it is,” she said absently. And then she laughed. “Maybe those awful women put a hex on me. Maybe that’s the only thing that’s wrong with me. They kept saying they thought I ought to quit.”

“Do you think you ought to quit?” Simon asked her.

Magda was surprised. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “I’d never want to quit. You’re never going to have to worry about that with me.”

Simon didn’t look like he was worrying about her. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking away from the house and into the cold black sky. Magda swung her painful leg in the air and stared at the back of his neck, at that place where the barber’s razor had cut too close and left the skin looking raw and red.

Funny, Magda thought. You’d almost think he wanted to get rid of me.

Why would he want to get rid of her when they were so close to getting everything they wanted, to going national, to being really important in the field? They had been together for over thirty years. Ideas like that simply made no sense at all.

Funny, Magda thought again, and then she found herself forcing herself to get up, to stand straight, to move without limping. For some reason she couldn’t fully understand, it now seemed more important to walk without limping in front of Simon than it had to walk that way in front of all those strangers at the party.

In all the years they had been together, Magda had never seen Simon as dangerous to her, or as a threat, or as someone she needed to protect herself from. Suddenly, he was all those things, and she didn’t think he would ever go back to being anything else. He still looked like a character out of W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene, but now he looked like the wrong one, the one that would be played by Sidney Greenstreet in the movie.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked her, turning away from his contemplation of the sky.

Magda gave him a big grin and told him she most definitely was.





3


BY THE TIME DESSA Carter was able to leave work, it was so late she almost forgot about stopping in at Fountain of Youth to pick up the material she needed. If her way home had been in the other direction, she would have forgotten about it. She came out into the parking lot with her head pounding. Even after she was safely behind the wheel of her car, she could feel the grunt and whine of the machines from her neck to her ankles, like a pulse. Her car was a Pontiac Grand Prix that had been old on the day she bought it. Lately, it had developed radiator problems that kicked in whenever the heat or the air-conditioning was on. Dessa put her big cloth bag into the passenger bucket to her left and her forehead down on the steering wheel. She had started work at eight o’clock that morning and gone straight through, except for half an hour for lunch, all day. She had racked up enough overtime to pay for another week of having Mrs. O’Reilly in and a full-scale shop at the grocery store. She had started on the needle assembly line and ended up with stamping, because stamping didn’t take any skill and could be done when you were tired. Her shoulders ached and her fingers were raw and bloody. It was going to take three days just like this one to pay for what she wanted at Fountain of Youth.

I ought to give it up and just forget about it, Dessa told herself as she eased her car out of the lot and onto the darkened access road. Everybody always said there ought to be more lights on this road, but nobody ever did anything about it. There was a big sign at the entrance to the parking lot that said, “The Braxton Corporation—Better Medicine for a Better Future,” making it sound as if Braxton were a pharmaceuticals company, which it wasn’t. Braxton made “medical supplies,” like hypodermic needles and blood pressure cuffs. Dessa spent her life sitting in a small chair at a small table, wearing a surgical mask and surgical gloves and a surgical hair cap, trying to be sterile for $6.10 an hour.

The access road could take you straight to the Wilbur Cross Highway, or into New Haven itself. Dessa shifted her bulk nervously in the bucket seat and made her choice. She had been listening to the ads for a month now, on the radio and sometimes on very late night TV. “A New You for the New Year,” some of them said—or maybe it was “A New Body for the New Year.” Dessa never listened to radio or television with her full attention anymore. Whatever the ads said, they made her happy. Sometimes, in the still early hours of Sunday morning, when her father was tucked safely away in bed with the bedroom door locked and she had eaten her way through two pounds of Lay’s potato chips and eleven cans of Old El Paso guacamole dip, the ads almost made her feel as if she could do something to change her life.