The Snare

20. REMAINS

20. REMAINS What had it all meant? Julia went around all afternoon after the train left, all through the French Quarter and elsewhere , trying to find somebody who knew and would tell her, and in the late afternoon she went to the hospital, to the out-patient clinic. Her shoulder had kept hurting, so much that she couldn't sleep and she thought something might have got broken. Sprained, they told her; that was all. The doctor who strapped her into place discovered in the course of his interview that she was talking in the detached and nonconsecutive manner of the addict or the psychopath. "You need somebody," he said. "Is there anybody I can call?" "Call," Julia echoed, seeing again the sluggish stream of all humanity. You can call, she thought, but how can you get their attention? "For instance," he said, "who was beating you? Don't tell me you ran into the door and then slipped in the bathtub? Is he sober now? Has he come out of it?" "He's gone," she said. "A jazz musician." "Then he can't be far." "A Yankee.Goneback home, I guess. Can you beat it? A Yankee playing jazz?" "Don't you have any family? Don't you have anybody else?" She looked out the window. It was turning summer, full and fabulous. The great leaves of New Orleans were a rich green. Tommy Arnold, she thought, the first time in months. Nothing shocks him. At the idea of shock, i5i 152 T H E S N A R E which had not occurred to her before, and the thought of someone she had known a year ago, she looked at her face in the mirror, a white-painted frame mounting her face like a portrait. It was a picture she had just as soon not have seen. Something had been smashed. Not just the eye. What can anybody do to anybody? she had asked herself in passing, a year back. Especially in love? Well, there before her was the answer. Whatever can be done had been done, but still she did not know quite what it was (leaving out the black eye) or why it was even important . What's so important about me? she wondered, and saw again the slow progress of the river teeming with humanity thicker than a million schools of catfish. What was so important about any one of them? As this returned vision floated by once more between herself and the good square face of the doctor, she thought she saw a signal from out the throng—an arm lifted in its swift progress, a shouting face. A signal to her? Undoubtedly. Had it happened the first time she saw the vision? Had it? "You're hallucinating now, aren't you?" the doctor asked, for the third time. Next he'd ask her what she was "on"; maybe he already had. Tm finished with it/' she said, ambiguously, but suddenly turning into her old self—the Julia Garrett who had shown up in front of Tommy Arnold at the Squiremeister party. "It was all just like something for a change, you know. All my time with him. An adventure. Anyway, he's gone." "Who's gone?" "The man, of course. Not that I wasn't involved. I really was. It's the honest truth," she added, and that remark went back to Martin Parham's sister, up in Mississippi , who always used to be saying something was "the honest truth." The doctor did not laugh. "What did he do?" "He wanted to be a musician—a good one. In jazz, guitar. Not so much to be great, but be really good, be right, you know. Then all of a sudden, he couldn't. He Elizabeth Spencer 153 thought our feelings did all the wrong things. Thought I drained him, I guess." "Did you?" "Who knows?" "The red lamp at the parties," the young doctor said. "The sessions, the songs, the crazy sex " "The sex wasn't crazy," she said quickly, snapping back even more. At least she could say that. "Ours wasn't. It was straight—and good." "It's going to be hard not to go back," the doctor suggested . "To that sort of life, you mean?" she asked. "I don't mind finding a different life. I guess I have to now he's gone. Of course I can...