Two Nurses, Smoking by David Means

Author:David Means
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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I still think about that story. Not the beginning or the end, not the sense that I had—the perplexity—when I held the entire thing, but that time at the window just before Anna filled me in on the second part, told me the twist about the swimming and the Y and all of that. She had restrained herself from telling me that part up front. She could have told me her side of the story first, giving me the pool and the swimming and then the sauna and then getting to Karl’s story at Coffee Klatch second, putting an emphasis on how strange he was that day in the coffee shop, and her inability to interrupt him, to say, Hey, wait, I thought Debbie loved the water. Looking back now I remember more than anything the feeling I had as we stood at the window that there was some elegiac beauty in the scene, however delusional it might have been, of visionary Karl as he finished meditating and opened his eyes to the bright reality of the world he was in—no matter how horrible he felt, after the court battles, the alimony, the fight over Ethan and the house and his restaurant—to spot the red dot. Why can’t we simply honor his befuddled, mind-blown bewilderment? The strange way the world can turn inside out? The majesty of his wife’s phobia!

Stop. Leave it right there, I wish I’d said to Anna. Leave it pure mystery. I wish I’d turned from her and walked back to the kitchen to get another drink, where maybe I would’ve been drawn into a conversation with someone else, letting the part about the pool and swimming remain unspoken. I wish my wife, Sharon, had come up to me right then—she was sitting with her drink, chatting up Bruce, ignoring me because we had fought on the way to the party about a late car payment, and I know if she’d come in to refresh my drink she might’ve caught me at the window with Anna, detected some illicit conspiratorial erotic energy in our postures. Better yet, I wish Karl had been at that party that night so I could’ve buttonholed him into a long conversation about something, music, anything, and maybe somehow, just by hanging out with him and talking about his failed marriage, changed some small aspect of his life, something tiny but enough to butterfly-effect his fate in some other direction, just as I often wish that I had gone—when I was younger, when I had the opportunity—to the funeral of my good friend’s father in St. Louis, where I would’ve also been with the writer, my friend’s other best friend, and if I’d gone, and I know this is a preposterous, egotistical thing to imagine, but I still do it, maybe we would’ve bonded and become close friends and maybe, just maybe, I would’ve done something to change his own fate.

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