Moth by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

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 présent 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 Française event, a special showing of a film version of L’Étranger 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.