Another You by Ann Beattie Page B

someone at student health.”
    “If this has to do with psychological counselling, I’d need to refer you to someone else. Sonja may have told you that I’m involved in research right now.” There was a slight echo on the line as she spoke the last word of each sentence. “Now,” he heard, in a quiet tinny waver.
    “Still, could I drop by?” he said.
    “Certainly.” Gray socks; he was right. “I usually take a break around two, or you could come when we close at five.”
    “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be there at five.”
    As he replaced the phone, it rang almost immediately. It was Sonja, calling from Littleton, ten miles away, wanting to know whether she had left her gloves in the basket by the door, or whether she’d forgotten them at the house she’d shown earlier that morning. He sprinted into the hallway and saw them there: the long suede gloves. “Weren’t you cold without them when you walked out the door?” he asked.
    “I was sleepwalking,” she said.
    The second call—it was probably best the calls hadn’t come in reverse order; it would have been difficult to withhold the news from Sonja—was that Evie had had some sort of seizure, not a stroke, a seizure, and was awaiting transfer to the hospital. For a long time he’d known this was coming, and yet he hadn’t known, had done nothing to prepare himself. He had conveniently pretended that Evie’s situation wouldn’t worsen; he had seized upon whatever encouraging news Sonja gave him after her visits: that Evie had laughed at a joke; that she’d suggested he might help out by baking cakes, which Sonja thought might have been a subtle joke on Evie’s part. He knew he had let her down in big ways as well as small. He wished, foolishly, that he had baked a cake for Evie. He wrote down the name of the doctor and the hospital’s phone number, thanked the person who had called, then stood with his hands in the pockets of his robe, looking out the back door at the white lawn, the white bushes. The wind was gusting,blowing the fine, dry snow upward as the sky sent down more in a gradual sift. If Evie died, he was going to be filled with regret, and Sonja was going to be very, very sad. If she died, he was going to feel guilty that he hadn’t accompanied Sonja on her many visits to see her: he was always secretly pleased when Sonja made the trips alone, relieved that he wouldn’t be expected to relive the past with Evie or, worse, be asked to read to her from her anthology of poetry: insipid, rhymed poems that were a travesty of the genre, as if he, a professor, were inseparable from the drivel any uninspired fool had written. A seizure: What did that mean? You lived in your body, but when something went wrong, you had to consult a doctor to tell you what had happened. It was absurd, how little everyone knew: it was like inhabiting a house while at the same time suspecting that if you peeked under the rug, you would realize the floor sagged because the supports had rotted, and what that meant was that you had several options. Inspect for termites, first off, everyone in agreement. Then, if termites could be ruled out, what? Surgery? The various degrees of pain imagined and computed, rarely referred to directly. Except that if the problems were bad enough, you could always—at least hypothetically—exchange one house for another, while the body was the only house you would ever inhabit, inescapable, the decor dealt out hereditarily, the gradual deterioration nothing you could do very much about. From his robe he took the note he’d pocketed earlier, in the upstairs bathroom, and looked again at Sonja’s simple house. It seemed, like all symbols, evocative and also mysterious—a serviceable image that would communicate simply at the same time it implied complexity: there was no such thing as a winding road that was only a winding road (thank you, Robert Frost; thanks, Beatles). As he pocketed the note on his way upstairs to dress, he