"It began, all of it," Michael said, his voice Julliard smooth, the long-ago sitting in his eyes, "when I was perhaps five or six. I had an uncle, Ephel was his name. He was a paraplegic, not from riding a bike, but getting hit by a bike, right in the middle of Atlantic Ave. The irony of it came crawling all over me when I first came here, seeing all these guys, and some gals, now maimed forever. Anyway, he was relegated to a back room in my parents' apartment. They had the whole floor of a three-decker in Mattapan because there was a gang of us. They'd been there for years, and three of the older kids had moved out, two brothers and a sister. When Ephel had to come out of the hospital and stay someplace, ours was the place, the only place. But he was dumped into the backroom of the apartment; no way out on his own. All he ever asked for were new books. Any kind of books he had not read. Then once he asked for a good light and a friend of his came by and put up this set of lights could blind the sun. He read to me, old Ephel did, days on end. I loved him, wanted to take him for walks, see the city, see some of his friends, get some fresh air, but I couldn't. I hated the way he had to live. I always thought the books kept him alive, kept him going, the way he'd just the damn magic out of them with this magnificent voice he had, a cross between Pappy Grinstone down in Raleigh and Dylan Thomas at a poem and the guy whose name I can't remember who did the old NFL films. Seemed to have it all together, he did, he really did, and then one day, just before I got home from school, he jumped out the window, no more a burden to my folks. It crushed my father and mother. Crushed me. We hadn't done enough; it was that simple looking back on how it all had slipped away from us. I tell you, I wasn't born for this job, I was made for it. Ephel made me come to it. It's that simple. I owed him a lot. He knew what he was doing… he shaped me for this."
"Just that makes you what you are? You know you're so different than most of the others. I won't say all the others, but most of them. There's a special cut about you. Now I can see where you're coming from."
"And where are you coming from? What about the lovebirds? You got me smoking my pipe, tipping out my insides, trying for an opening. You used all the good tools. Now, what's in the back of your mind? It's like you're bargaining, Todd, I swear, making proposals." Michael was seated on an ottoman, nodding his head slowly as if drawing information from Todd, the creases still visible in his shirt sleeves and in his pant legs, a composite of elegance, of quiet dignity that had a mute trumpet at work.
"I think Marty Vreeland's in love with Valerie Pinchon." Todd's eyes flashed. He nodded his head, and said, "Or he's crazy hungry, like he might have been before. You can't knock a guy for that. Least, I can't."
Michael nodded his head. "Everybody has to love somebody around here or they'd go nuts. You have to grab some kind of anchor. Valerie's his anchor."
Todd thought Michael might have sounded like a professor at the lectern, but he had often heard him dispensing good advice to good listeners in the facility. "But there's a new edge to this," he said, and quickly added, "they want to screw around, French or what, I don't know, but it has to be handled by someone kind enough, thoughtful enough, and liberal enough. No crap in it. No taking sides. Sex or love, I don't know. That's up to them."
"Yes, and…?" Michael said.
"Somebody has to put them up to it. Literally, I mean. Find a room where they can have some time for themselves. Line them up like loving little soldiers on parade. Place them. Position them, whatever it takes to let them be aware of each other." Todd's voice must have risen then. "He's dying to get near her. It sure ain't easy, as the saying goes." He had a quizzical look on his face, one would gather, as he continued: "They get washed up or whatever, I don't know, but I can guess where I'd be if I had it in for her."
"That's not privacy," Michael said, standing beside Todd, and Todd in the shadow of the human eclipse. "That's invasion!"
"Oh, knock it off, Michael, how in hell otherwise would they get at it? They need help. That's why I came to you. Think I'd go to any of those other jerks with their noses half the time up their own butt? They're about as sensitive as crutches. This whole thing is a paycheck for most of them, every damn minute here."
For a brief second, Todd reassessed his statement, and then continued. "Well, not all of them, but sure enough, enough of them that they make politics out of it, something more than just economics. And sure as hell they'd blab it from here to kingdom come. I'd bet on it. They'd shoot their mouths off about it. They'd carry tales down to the city. They'd fall all over themselves trying to get out the poor-ass story about a couple of quads think they're okay playing fucking games!" Todd would have risen from his chair, but his legs were long gone, as if frozen in time, the nerves severed, all the controls gone over to the other side. His face had gone pink and then gone to a red carrying an anger Michael could measure. "Can't you just see some of them, down there in O'Malley's or
The Dugout or The Meadowglen, just shooting off their mouths about the two quads going at it?"
Sensitive as he was, Michael had the sudden look on his face as if he were thinking about his wife Mercedes and how it would be with her and a third party if anything like this might ever come between them. Oh, he could feel the small riot building almost immediately. There were grounds on which one never trod with her, not even hinted at in discussion.
"What's Valerie's take on this?" Michael said. "She really have a say the way she wants to go?" His question, he realized, hung itself out in the air bright as any double- entendre.
Even as Todd snickered a reply, Michael also had a whole lot of questions posing for answers. He probably couldn't broach the subject with Valerie, never mind even asking her questions about preferences, positions, whatever. Then Michael must have realized it didn't make a hell of a lot of difference if he could just get Valerie and Marty together. He reinforced himself, saying under his breath, "It's what makes the world go 'round."
"She's all for it," Todd replied, the tinge of red now fading, his huge hands relaxing on the wheels. "Marty didn't tell me. Valerie told me herself, those blue eyes of hers lit up like the match is burning all the time regardless of what everything else looks like in here. Like a frigging pilot light, on all the time. We know she had a lot going for her before her accident, the guys chasing her since she was barely fourteen or so. Now, sometimes, she says, she's half wild again with the idea. I swear to God it's like she could have been crying, like coming out of a long dream or a damn nightmare for that matter, not that it's ever going to be over by a long shot. But you know her almost as much as I do. She's one tough chick to hang on this long, not cracking her head wide open, going off the other side. Got to admit, memory's often a killer in a place like this. Have to keep it in some kind of order, and that's a reverence and a preference in itself, so if she's for the oral stuff or whatever, it makes no difference. She's just game. She even kissed me on the cheek after we talked about it, said I smelled like the old days. How do you like them apples, huh? The old biker's still got a wallop!" He wagged two forefingers on the wheels as though denoting minor erections. "And she was wearing some goddamned sweet-ass perfume, I can tell you!"
Michael, on his rounds a few minutes later, saw Valerie sitting at the end of the corridor, looking down on the span of field between her and the town spread wide in a brown and gold encounter with day. October had crashed in a late rain the past week, the leaves at flight, acorn color coming once again. The same color was in her hair. She felt the shadow over her shoulder, measured its play on the wall and knew it was Michael, her favorite orderly, a hunk and a half in his own right.
"Hey, man," she said, "you been talking to our mutual friend, my agent of sorts?" The throaty tone rose from her as small as child's laughter. Her eyes were lit-up blue, her nose small and neat with a slight bump in it, and a scar, slim as a saber, accompanying her left brow. The thin span of the scar was a testimony to the hand of the surgeon who had saved her face but had come hard against saving her limbs from permanent dangle. She spun the wheelchair about, let the light of an overhead neon hit her eyes, knew the flash of light bounced on its way. Michael had once again assessed the warmth in the 27-year-old woman who had been bounced against the back end of a trailer rig by her biker boyfriend out on the Mass Pike. She had been 22 hours between the emergency room and the operating room before they threw in the towel.
"This proposal of sorts," Michael offered, "that your agent offered up. I can assist, but it's got to be a very private matter, and I don't want it blabbed about so that I'll be inundated with private heart requests. I can't become a full-time Valentine and do the job I'm intended to do." His deep brown eyes poured into hers in a serious demand. "And before I get caught up in some strange embarrassment, I'd want to get a few things squared away with you."
"Don't you worry, Michael, he's pulling my strings all ready, probably having a merry old time as it is. Guys' stuff, you know. Something about him gets me and I'll have to admit, it has for a long time. I can give you all the instructions you need, and please, don't for a minute get any deeper involved than what it appears to be, just a little exploratory sex and matters of the mind. We've all had a try at that."
She told him all that she could. He listened, he nodded, he left.
The next day the arrangements were settled and put into action. The room was set up. The key to the door was set aside.
Night came. Valerie took herself to the appointed room. Marty Vreeland was there ahead of her. They looked at each other. Michael walked in and locked the door behind him.
"You ain't staying, are you, Michael?" Marty said.
Valerie laughed at him. "Strange number," she said. "Strange combo."
Michael and Marty let it go past them.
The arrangements were arranged. Michael, with care and aplomb and utter respect, shifted Valerie so that she was comfortable on the bed. He wiped a few beads of perspiration from her brow. Then, with heavy muscles working, cords and sinews contrasted against the white of his uniform, he situated Marty. He felt no embarrassment, saw none, saw the face of Mercedes as it might be if she were in the room, the cold fears she would exhibit, seeing her mother over her shoulder where she resided for too much of Mercedes' life.
Michael, preparing to part, smiled at the two of them. "Ring the buzzer if you need me. I'll be at my desk."
He smiled again in his bright darkness and touched each one on the shoulder where full sensation swam. The three of them felt the connection, felt the light or the electricity or the sense of passion and need and want and utter frustration all rolled into charge that ran right through them.
Valerie's eyes were on fire again. She said, with eyes flashing, "Oh, what a threesome we could make."
And she finished by saying:
Today the sun is shining, the clouds have sprung on past,
The heart is playing somewhere, though this love can never last;
But somewhere a guy is smiling and somewhere a doll exults,
For though we keep on dreaming, think long about results.
Tom Sheehan's Epic Cures won a 2006 IPPY Award. A Collection of Friends (Pocol PressO, was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. He has nine Pushcart and three Million Writer nominations, a Noted Story nomination, a Silver Rose Award from ART, and the Georges Simenon Award for Fiction. He served in Korea, 1951-52. He's published four novels and four books of poetry. Forthcoming are Brief Cases, Short Spans (Press53, 2008) and From the Quickening (Pocol Press, 2009). He's one of the ROMEOs, the Retired Old Men Eating Out, (92/80/79/78). They’ve co-edited two books on their hometown of Saugus, Massachusetts.