Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

“I knew I liked her right away,” said Jamie, on How We Met autopilot, but making faces to reflect the effects of the spousal massage. “She could sing. And she was the only woman in Sing It! who didn’t seem easy. Some of those girls were desperate.”

She smiled wifeishly, dug an elbow into his back.

Was this the reason I found myself alone? I was very easy. I couldn’t figure out why to wait. That wasn’t it. I could figure out why, but not how. I wasn’t ready for someone to think I was the least slutty girl at the bar, to marry what I wouldn’t yield.

“Do I seem easy?” I said.

“No,” said Jamie. “You’re great.”

Was great the opposite of easy?

Julie had draped herself over the local drummer. She fed him guacamole. She’d forgotten the mission, our reason for coming backstage, or maybe she was actually interested in the drummer. The wife kept kneading. She dug into Jamie with her fingers, her knuckles, her thumbs.

“Ow!” he yelped. “A little softer, babe. You’ve got a sick man, here. So I’m diagnosed the morning of our first date. I don’t know what to do — do I cancel? Will she think it’s an excuse? Having cancer? Somehow I find myself walking to her apartment. I show up at her door with a bouquet of poppies and tell her she probably shouldn’t have dinner with me.”

They both smiled at this obstacle, quickly overcome because of the wife’s determination to accompany him to his entire illness. She was his plus one. I had read this numerous times on ISTB, but the two of them were ready to make people cry in the paper of record. I had friends who were journalists. I could do PR for this cause.

“We can’t thank you enough for everything,” said the wife. For what? Twenty dollars? IMing her husband at night? Jamie reached around and patted her thigh, massaging the masseuse.

“Maybe I can help more,” I said.

—

JAMIE HAD a colonoscopy appointment. His wife had to work. I had to work, too, but I’d called in sick, told Jamie and wife that I had the day off. I would be the designated adult to get him after the procedure, or I was designating myself an adult in the presence of a heavily sedated cancer patient I had a crush on. In any event, I was old enough.

Morning light streamed into a pavilion named after somebody wealthy and dead. Nurses wheeled patients through sun motes, patients who didn’t bother to squint. A security guard told me I was in the wrong building. These were all the wrong buildings. Not one of them was the right place to be.

I hurried to Outpatient Services, then waited for three hours. I squirted my hands with antibacterial foam. I read a parenting magazine. Before there were blogs, there were magazines. They came every month and told you how to parent as a verb. Now the mommies blogged their mommy screw-ups daily — the burnt nut loaf, the unsafe car seat. They failed publicly to show you they were still people. I wasn’t convinced. Jamie’s sperm was in a vial somewhere in case his wife needed it later to prove she was still a person. I read this, too, on Jamie’s blog. If he made it, he would make a good daddy blogger. If he didn’t make it, his children would just whisper their updates, or even dream them. Here in the waiting room, we weren’t allowed to use electronic devices to forget where we were. We had to grease up old magazines with our fingers, take advice from outdated horoscopes.

“Who’s here for Jamie C.?” A tiny nurse looked for me. My old horoscope had told me to welcome new experiences.

“I’m the designated adult,” I said, standing.

“He’s in Recovery,” she said. I thought the nurse might ask after Mrs. C., or if she knew Mrs. C., ask why I wasn’t her. But she didn’t ask. She led me to Recovery, where middle-aged people lay recovering from their routine colonoscopies.

“Can I have my phone, Ida?” said Jamie, once we got behind the curtain. He turned to me. “They let me use it in here.”

The nurse handed him the backpack she’d been carrying. It held the clothing he wore to look like the rest of us.

“Don’t get dressed too fast,” she said. “Or walk out in your shorts like last time.”

“I love you, Ida,” he said. He took her picture, then my picture, then a picture of the two of us together.

“You’re my Champions of the Day,” he said. He handed us both stickers out of his bag. “Ida is Champion in Chief. You can be the First Lady.”

“I read up on the prep last night,” I said, after the departure of the president. “It sounds difficult.”

“This is my fifth time,” he said. “My shit runs clear before I even drink the stuff.”

He didn’t look up from his phone as he quipped. He was already typing his impressions of this colonoscopy, comparing it to the previous four.

“I thought you’d be more tired,” I said. “Or drugged.”

“So you could have your way with me?”

“Of course not,” I said. Then I saw that being serious made it seem like I had it worse for him. “I wanted you completely unconscious.”

“Well, soon I’ll be dead.” He smiled and kept blogging.

“What did the doctor say?”

“I only see Singh today. He tells me what he saw. Then Weiselberg calls. She tells me what it means.” Weiselberg and Singh were members of the oncology team he kept thanking.

“What could it mean?” I asked.

“Don’t you read Immuno?”

“Not that often,” I said. “I keep meaning to get around to it.”

“I really don’t have the energy to catch you up right now. Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

He squinted, then spoke in a new voice.

“I think Julie has a crush on me,” he said.

“That’s not healthy,” I said. Poor Julie. She’d slept with the drummer, but Jamie still suspected her.

“She’s all over me. You’re all over me. I feel like I can’t breathe.”

It was confusing to want to punch someone in a hospital gown, but his face above the gown looked like a lot of faces I had seen deliver this message.

“Has the anesthesia worn off?” I asked. Maybe we could blame the drugs.

“Yeah, totally,” he said. “People want to be a part of this, and I appreciate that. But I’m married.”

“I know you’re married. I read your blog.”

He looked down, tapped a final set of keys, then sent his words into a sphere all of us used without understanding. We used to call it the World Wide Web, but at some point the world had dropped out. The wide was gone. It was a narrow web connecting us to those who would never love us back.

“I’ll let you get dressed.” I turned to go to wherever wasn’t here.

“No, Captain. Stay for the results.”

I stood as far from him as three feet allowed. Jamie put on his clothes. I helped him tie his shoes as a token gesture. Then Singh pulled back the curtain and told us what he saw.

REBECCA HAD SEX RECENTLY, but she forgot. The guy had a flat-screen TV in his room, and a brother, who also had a flat screen in his room. There was a third flat screen in the living room for the brothers to watch together.

Rebecca slept with the smaller but older brother. The younger brother looked up from his flat screen as though, Rebecca thought, surprised that his older brother could sleep with a girl as pretty as Rebecca. Later she found out that he only looked surprised because the brother Rebecca slept with actually had a girlfriend. The look was the “You’re not his girlfriend” look. Rebecca had seen it before.

Rebecca had seen it this year, when she slept with a bass player, which caused her to get a neck injury and discover a chiropractor. The chiropractor was young and dated another chiropractor. Rebecca left out that the bass player had a girlfriend, because it didn’t seem related to her neck. The chiropractor told Rebecca that her problems were in her whole body.