The Muse
The needle slipped into her arm, and the vial flooded red. Gretchen watched it, this flow of unmitigated truth. Next to her, the woman in wrinkled blue scrubs smiled.
“You’re my last draw for the day, Ms. Collier,” the woman said. Her name tag read Sandee Johnson. “Then I’m off to see my grandbaby at Heckscher Playground, make the most of this beautiful weather.”
This last statement, a bit of irrelevancy disguised as small talk, was meant to distract from the blood draw, as was Sandee Johnson’s smile: twin rows of gleaming white Chiclets in a kind black face. It was a medical professional’s smile: the mouth resolutely cheerful (never mind that hypodermic needle), the eyes soft and reserved (in somber acknowledgement of whatever Sandee Johnson imagined Gretchen’s circumstances to be, not that it was any of her business). When the woman’s gentle scrutiny lingered a beat too long, Gretchen made a show of dropping her own eyes and tightening her lips into a pitiable expression before turning her face away.
Of course Sandee Johnson could not possibly suspect the real reason behind Gretchen’s blood work. But truth was not part of this game. Sandee Johnson fished for something, and so Gretchen gave something to her. She allowed herself a glance back at her phlebotomist, and was satisfied to find a ghost of pity in the woman’s furrowed brows. Her satisfaction was cut short by the realization she’d promised to stop playing such games. It was true what they said about old habits.
“That’s lovely: a visit to the park with your grandchild,” Gretchen said, engaging with Sandee Johnson as reparation. How false, how American she sounded. She gestured toward the lab’s skylight, where a rectangle of blue sky could be seen. “You’re right about it being a beautiful day.”
Sandee Johnson smiled again, genuinely this time, her eyes filled with love for a grandbaby at the playground.
“No grandchildren for you though, Ms. Collier, huh? You can’t be old enough.”
“Maybe someday.”
Did this mundane conversation set things right? Gretchen couldn’t tell. Reparation, penance, amends. It was all a new endeavor, one brought on by a voice through a metal grate. Now, her blood continued to spill into the vial, bright and full of promise. The rubber tourniquet pinched Gretchen’s bicep, and she sat immobilized on the lab’s cushioned, thick-armed, elevated throne, saying nothing further.
She’d done a different kind of tongue holding on the phone with the lawyer two weeks earlier. His accent over the line saying Brooklyn to her the way her own likely had said Somewhere-in-France to him, he’d requested she bring to his office all relevant documents. She’d said nothing at all for three full seconds before uttering a breathy, “Got it,” as if she’d been taking it all down on paper. Her silence made one implication, and her response another. Gretchen had no relevant documents. But what mattered—securing the appointment—had been achieved.
She’d walked into that lawyer’s office carrying a red leather tote large enough to contain relevant documents. She wore shoes that implied she could afford to pay for this consultation. Her hair—its scattered grays purposely untouched—she wore twisted back in a way that said she was sincere and trustworthy. She’d also painted her lips full and red in the event all else failed.
The lawyer, Jonathan Bellerman, had the graying temples of an early forty-something expecting to be taken seriously. He’d rested his elbows on his cliché of a mahogany desk and teepeed his fingertips together in a gesture of sincerity and professional interest.
“You are here, Ms. Collier,” he’d said in his stickball-on-Ditmas-Avenue accent, his pen scratching across a notepad on his desk, “because you seek to establish paternity—for your own father, is that correct?
Gretchen did not parrot “correct” back at him but only nodded, once.
“You anticipate he will deny your claim. I’m guessing there is an estate he’s interested in protecting?”
“I imagine there is. The man in question is Marty Murphy. The writer?”
The lawyer blinked, a micro-reaction. “I just read the piece on his book in The New Yorker: ‘The Muse Turns Fifty.’ The article did say he’d fallen ill.”
“He is terminally ill.”
The words were all but legible in the lawyer’s eyes: gold digger. Mr. Bellerman clicked the pen in his fingers, once, twice, three times, and then set it down on the pad.
“You should know I am not an estate lawyer, Ms. Collier, but I could refer you to one.”
“I don’t need an estate lawyer. I am not doing this to gain an inheritance, Mr. Bellerman.” Gretchen watched the man conceal a dubious expression behind a new finger teepee. This was the problem with the truth. It sounded too much like a lie.
The lawyer’s hands dropped open. “May I ask why you are doing it?”
She would not say penance. “My father is dying alone in a hospital, Mr. Bellerman. I’m his daughter, and I have no legal access to him. Not even to say goodbye.”
Mr. Bellerman’s expression wavered between doubt and sympathy before squaring again into lawyerly professionalism.
“All right,” he said. “You want to visit him. Are you aware that the federal regulations for patient visitation rights have changed? You don’t need to be blood-related to visit sick loved ones in the hospital.”
“Well, I am aware that visitation privileges must be granted by the patient—or his representative. You don’t have to have read the article in the New Yorker to know my father has been a recluse since The Muse was published. That was, what—1961? His privacy has been fiercely guarded by the same attorney for decades. My guess is any number of crazed Marty Murphy fans would like to ogle the man on his deathbed. You think his lawyer will freely grant a stranger visitation?”
The muscles worked in Mr. Bellerman’s cheeks. “Probably not.”
“If we were in any other state in this country, I could pluck a hair from my father’s hairbrush and send it off to a lab. But we are in New York State, where a paternity test can only legally be ordered by a doctor, a court, or a lawyer.”
“You sound awfully confident about the test results. Are you prepared for the media circus if you’re wrong? Or for the matter, if you’re right?”
“I’m not interested in subjecting my father to the public he detests,” Gretchen said. “If his attorney agrees to a paternity test, I will keep the test and its results private for as long as he is alive, and possibly longer. On the other hand, if my father’s attorney does not agree to the test, then, yes, I’m willing to go into the spotlight. I have nothing to lose by going to the media.”
She had everything to lose by going to the media. But Mr. Bellerman’s hungry look revealed twin facts: first, he would indeed represent her. And second, her threat of going to the media would likely be sufficient to keep her out of it. She, for whom everything hung in a delicate balance.
“Not all lies are harmful,” she’d told the priest.
“Justifying a lie does not change its nature. A lie is a lie, whether a white lie or a whopper.” Gretchen had not liked Father Silva’s use of the word “whopper.” It sounded too foreign in his Brazilian mouth. More, “whopper” implied something gratuitous, which no serious supplanting of the truth ever was. “Whopper” suggested an arbitrary act, freely chosen. It did not evoke that sense of your back against the wall.
“Surely there are degrees of lies, just as there are degrees of sins,” she’d answered back into the shadows beyond the grate. “Venial, mortal?”
“If mortal sin is the house, then venial sins are the front steps,” said Father Silva. “The same with small lies and big lies. No one just appears in a house. You must first go up the steps.”
Releasing the tourniquet, Sandee Johnson drew back her needle and attempted to divert Gretchen’s attention with a cotton ball and a bandage and a stream of chatter as she capped the vial of Gretchen’s blood. Gretchen unrolled her sleeve and imagined this vial winding up next to that of her father’s on a metal lab table, where a technician would discover the commonality in their white blood cells, how the links in their respective chains of DNA told the same exact story.
It was mere formality, this test. It was for the satisfaction of lawyers and, possibly, of courts. It was a confirmation of what Gretchen already knew. The truth about the lie they’d lived these many years.
Mr. Bellerman managed to arrange a trip for her to the hospital to witness the blood being drawn from her father. The emaciated and liver-spotted Marty Murphy lay under a hospital blanket, connected to beeping machinery and tubes of narcotics, and when the needle had gone into his arm, his eyes simply opened as if waking from a nap. These eyes, which had rested upon hers just one other time in their lives, looked at her again with the same stunned expression of recognition, and as the lawyers looked on in amazement, the writer infamous for his refusal to speak to strangers murmured to her in the faintest, hoarsest French, “You’ve come.”
The lawyers might or might not have spoken French, and they certainly could not have known the remarkable resemblance between Gretchen and her mother, but they could not have missed the import of Marty Murphy speaking in Gretchen’s native language. The lawyers shifted uncomfortably in their upholstered hospital chairs and looked over at her as she held the gaze of the man in the bed and answered,
“Oui. Je suis ici.” I am here.