Love, Work, Children by Cheryl Mendelson

Author:Cheryl Mendelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307431455
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

Peter Frankl tried to explain it to Lesley again, but she stared and frowned at him irritably.

“You’re talking nonsense,” she said. “I want Louis. He’ll do it.” She was sitting upright in her hospital bed, which had been raised to its highest position. Her scrubbed face, without makeup, looked particularly ravaged when it expressed, as now, suspicious annoyance, and her hair, unprecedentedly long, stood upright in dark clumps that showed starkly white roots.

Peter tried again to make her understand, with shorter sentences. “Susan can’t come yet. She’s in a meeting until noon. Her meeting is uptown. She can pick up the things because she’s uptown. Louis is at work downtown. He’ll be there all day. He—”

“What work? Louis at work?”

“Louis works at Hartley Stanton Thornwick.”

“No one told me about that.”

“I think we did, but you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

The therapist, a thin young woman with two tiny silver rings in her left eyebrow, intervened. “Mrs. Frankl, you need to be quiet and rest. You’ve been talking all morning, and you’re wearing yourself out. I’m going to ask your husband to leave so you can eat lunch and have a nap.”

“No, he’s going to stay, because it’s not lunchtime and I’m bored silly. I just want a few things from the drugstore and from home, and I don’t see why that’s such a big problem or why someone can’t—”

“Susan has your list, and she’ll be here in an hour or so. Lesley, I have to go to the office now.”

When Lesley regained consciousness, Peter had taken almost two weeks off work and spent every day with her in the hospital. Now he had urgent business to tend to. His partners were pushing him harder on resigning from the Devereaux Foundation. He had just learned that for weeks Edmond Lockhart had been pressuring his aunt Emma, too, to resign from the foundation’s board. Columbia had received three letters of complaint from seminar members about the preliminary meeting in June. Tending to Lesley all day long, while coping with these anxieties, had exhausted him. Even Peter’s ample store of patience was almost depleted.

“But when will you be back? Not until seven? What am I supposed to do until then? Peter, bring me my flowered robe when you come, and call Becky. I need my cell phone so I can keep it in my lap. I can’t reach that one. Why don’t you think of things like this? I can’t believe you really have to work. Wait . . . oh . . . Oh, I have it, never mind the cell phone. It was under the sheet. What’s Susan’s number—wait, it’s on here. I don’t remember how to—”

Peter kissed Lesley on the cheek and walked out while her words still flowed. He had to, because they would not stop. As he walked to the subway, Peter thought longingly and guiltily of the peace that had prevailed in their lives during the time Lesley was unconscious. He had come to experience it as normal.

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