crystal scotch tumblers. I clanked a couple of ice cubes into the glasses and poured out the warm liquid. By the time I got back, she was sitting up, patchy hair smoothed, the TV off.
“Alecto brought a new article he published to show me this afternoon. He was all excited.”
I handed her drink across the bed. “I know, he brought it to the barn, too. Did you read it?”
“No, I can’t read those things. What was it about?”
“It was a heart study.”
“He’s an entertaining fellow, just cynical enough. Strange today, it exhausted me, as if there’s not enough time for his showmanship. There’s nothing to him, is there. An empty shell. Full of words he can’t even speak any more.”
“That’s a bit strong.”
“Well, he asked today if I had any extra morphine.”
“Was he joking?”
“He tried to turn it into a joke. But if I’d offered, he would have taken it.”
“I have a feeling he’s become a regular down the road, too. . . . I told him you get tired easily. Just kick him out when he stays too long. Jo wishes he’d leave but he won’t say anything. He says Alecto’s like a tick that gets buried under your skin.”
I drank quickly, letting the golden liquid roll around the back of my throat. I looked at her yellow skin. Her eyes were bright, her breathing heavy.
“I wouldn’t get involved with him if I were you . . . if you’re tempted, I mean. Men like that are trouble . . . they never stay if their own pleasure’s at stake.”
“For heaven’s sake . . .”
“I mean even on work things. He’s ambitious.”
I poured myself another drink and held out the bottle to her. She nodded cheerfully and when I poured she held down my hand until her tumbler was half full. I raised my eyebrows and she said, “To hell with it, Sophie. I used to love our drinks together. What’s the difference?”
I heard her loneliness rattling around like a pea in a dried-up pod. It was good to drink with her again. I felt the liquid roll smooth down my throat and spread warmly through me. “If you could do anything you wanted to right now, what would you do?”
“I’d not be dying.”
“I know, but what else.”
She nibbled at the rim of her glass, then sat back stiffly as people who spend a lot of time in bed do. Finally she said, “I’d put on a wig and lots of make-up and a wild dress. I’d find out where there was an opening, someone else’s, look at some art, then go to a restaurant with dancing.”
I could see her as the young mother I’d lived alone with, in the daytime little flecks of paint on her hands, her eyes gazing far away, her lovely big-lipped smile as she showed me a twig or a moth’s wing under a magnifying glass, and in the evenings sitting across the kitchen table doing her nails while I watched, both of us smelling of bubble bath because I always went in with her, the fancy nail kit open between us, cuticle-pusher and tiny scissors and mother-of-pearl-handled files. “I have awful nails, Sophie,” she’d say, holding them up boldly. It was true. They were stained from her paints and broken and never all the same length. But she carefully painted each with three quick strokes of red and waved them in the air singing, “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn out the light, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say goodnight.” By then the babysitter would have arrived and she was off, and I wondered under the covers where adults go and what adults do at night.
I shifted to the edge of the bed and said, “Let’s do it now, let’s get dressed, put on make-up, call a taxi, go out.”
I wanted her dying to be suddenly a mistake, to escape just one last time.
“Soph, I can’t.”
“Sure you can, just once, come on, I’ll do your nails.”
I was already off her bed and in the bathroom gathering up bottles, cotton, a towel, make-up. I laid them all out on the sheets, took her hands and started. When I touched her I felt her body sucking my warmth. I massaged her often, trying to rub life into her, and she’d melt against me and say, “Oh that does feel good.”
But that night I sipped my scotch and vigorously filed her nails, then began to push back her cuticles, and she yelped, “Ouch, that hurts, Soph, slow down.”
I