by Lorrie Moore
“He’s a frail old man on the outs with his stepdaughters. He could use someone to help him with meals.”
“You’re fattening him for the kill?” They were looking into the abyss of the other, or so they both probably thought.
“What the hell are you talking about? He’s alone!”
“A lone what?”
“A lone ranger for God’s sake, what is wrong with you?”
“I don’t understand what you’re pretending.”
“I’m not pretending. What I don’t get is you: I thought I was doing what you wanted!”
He tilted his head quizzically the way he sometimes did when he was pretending to be a different person. Who are you doing that head-tilt thing for, she did not say.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “And I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Is that what you think? Hmmmm. Are we always such a mystery to ourselves and to others?”
“Is a disappointment the same as a mystery?”
“A disappointment is rarely a mystery.”
“I’m starting to lose confidence in you, Dench.” Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.
Now he lifted his face beatifically, as if to catch some light no one else could see. His eyes closed, and he began rubbing his hands through his hair. It was her least favorite thing that he did in the head-tilting department. “Sorry to interrupt your self-massage,” she said and turned to go and then turned back to say, “And don’t give me that line about someone has to do it.”
“Someone doesn’t have to. But someone should.” The muttered snark in their house was a kind of creature—perhaps the one in their walls.
“Yes, well, you’re an expert on should.”
It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.
The books she brought this time were Instinct for Death and The Fin de Millennial Lear. She and Milt stood before the nook and placed the volumes inside.
“Now you must come in and play the piano for me. At long last I’ve had it tuned.” Milt smiled. “You are even allowed to sing, if you so desire.”
She was starting again to see how large the house was, since if they entered through a different door she had no idea where she was. There were two side doors and a back one in addition to the front two. Two front doors! Life was hard enough—having to make that kind of decision every day could wear a person out.
She sat down at the piano, with its bell-like sound and real ivory keys, chipped and grainy. As a joke she played “The Spinning Song,” but he didn’t laugh, only smiled, as if perhaps it were Scarlatti. Then she played and sang her love song to the chef, and then she did “Body and Soul” and then her own deconstructed version of “Down by the River,” right there inside the house with no requests to leave and go down by an actual river. And then she thought that was probably enough and pulled her arms back, closed her mouth, and in imitation of Dench closed her eyes, lifted her face to the ceiling, and smoothed back her hair, prepping it for the wig maker. Then she shook her arms in the air and popped her eyes open.
Milt looked happier than she had ever seen him look. “Marvelous!” he said.
No one ever said marvelous anymore.
“Oh, you’re nice,” she said.
“I have an idea! Can you drive me downtown? I have an appointment in a half hour and I’d like you to come with me. Besides, I’m not allowed to drive.”
“All right,” she said. Of course she had guessed that soon she might be taking him to doctors’ appointments.
Instead, she drove him in his old, scarcely used Audi, which she found stored in the garage with a dust cloth over it, to his lawyer’s. “Meet my lovely new friend, Casey,” he said, introducing her as they were ushered into the lawyer’s gleaming office and the lawyer stared at her skeptically but shook her hand.
“Rick, I would like to change my will,” Milt said.
“Yes, I know. You wanted to—”
“No, now I want to change it even more than I said before. I know we were going to leave the house to the Children’s Hospital, which was Rachel’s wish, but they’re doing fine without us, their machinery’s over there tearing things up every day on that new wing. So instead I’d like to leave everything, absolutely everything, to Casey here. And to make her executor as well.”
Silence fell over the room as Milt’s beaming face went back and forth between pale-feeling KC and pale-looking Rick.
“Milt, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” KC said, clutching his arm. It was the first time she had actually touched him and it seemed to energize him further.
“Nonsense!” he said. “I want to free you from any burdens—it will keep you the angel you are.”
“It hardly seems that I’m the angel.”
“You are, you are. And I want you and your music to fly untethered.”
Rick gave her a wary look as he made his way slowly behind a mahogany desk the size of a truck flatbed. He sat down in a leather chair that had ball bearings and a reclining mechanism that he illustrated by immediately beginning to bounce against it and spin slightly, his arms now folded behind his neck. Then he threw himself forward onto a leather-edged blotter and grabbed the folder he had in front of him. “Well, I can get Maryanne to change everything right now.” Then Rick studied KC again, and in a voice borrowed from either his youth or his son, said to her, “Nice tats.”
She did not speak of it to Dench. She did not know how. She thought of being wry—hey, Villa is back! and this time it’s an actual villa—but there was no good way. She had been passive before Milt’s gift—gifts required some passivity—and she would remain passive before Dench. Besides, the whole situation could change on a dime, and she half hoped it would. Like almost everything, it existed in the hypothetical—God only knew how many times Milt had changed his will—so she would try not to think of it at all. Except in this way: Milt had no one. And now he had no one but her. Which was like having no one.
Dench appeared in the bathroom doorway as she was cutting bangs into her hair with nail scissors. “I thought you were growing your hair,” he said. “I thought you were going to sell it.”
“It’s just bangs,” she said, threw down the scissors, and brushed past him.
She began to take Milt to his doctors’ appointments, though she sat in the waiting room. “I’ve got reservations both at the hospice wing where your grandmother was and also right there,” he said as they passed the Heavenly Sunset Cemetery.
“Do you have a good tree?”
“What?”
“Do you have a good space beneath a strong tree?” she said loudly.
“I do!” he exclaimed. “I’m next to my wife.” He paused, brooding. “Of course she has on her gravestone ALONE AT LAST. So, I’m putting on mine NOT SO FAST.”
KC laughed, which she knew was what he wanted. “It’s good to have a place.”
At the doctor’s sometimes the nurse, and sometimes the physician’s assistant, would walk him back out to her and give her hurried and worried instructions. “Here is his new medicine,” they would say, “but if he has a bad response we’ll put him back on the other one.” Milt would shrug as if he were surrounded by a gaggle of crazy relatives.
Once, a nurse leaned in and whispered, “There’s a fear it may have spread to the brain. If you have any trouble on the weekend, phone the hospital or even the hospice. Watch his balance particularly.”
KC took another of I
an’s books to Milt’s book nook, and one day, not seeing the old man outside, she worriedly tied Cat to the book nook post, went up to the main door, and knocked. She opened it and stepped in. “Hello? Good morning? Milt?”
Out stepped a middle-aged woman with an authoritative stride. Her heels hit the floorboards and stopped. She wore black slacks and a white shirt tucked into the waistband. Her hair was cut short—thick and gray. It was the sort of hair that years ago, when it was dark, wigmakers would have paid good money for. The woman stood there staring for a long time and then said, “I know what you’re up to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One of his Concertos in Be Minor. How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“I wonder if he knows that. You look younger.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Hence your needs.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“No? You don’t?”
“No.” Denial, when one was accused, was a life force, and would trump any desire to confess. Perhaps this was the animal strength of the psychopathic brain. Or the psychopathy of the animal brain. An admission of guilt would knock the strength right out of you—making it easier for them to twist your arms behind you and put the handcuffs on. It was from Dench, perhaps, that she had learned this.
“Shall we sit?” The pewter-haired woman motioned toward one of the sofas.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“You don’t.”
“No, besides, I was just walking my dog, and he’s still tied up outside. I was just checking on Milt.”
“Well, my sister has taken him to his doctor’s appointment, so he won’t be needing you today.”
In bed KC lay next to Dench, staring at the ceiling, and smoking a cigarette, though they were not supposed to smoke inside. Cat lay on the quilt at the foot of the bed, doing his open-eyed fake-sleep. They were all carnies at the close of Labor Day. She stared at her Hammond keyboard, which right now had laundry piled and draped over it in angles. “What illness do you suppose Milt actually has?” Dench asked.
“Something quiet but wretched.”
“Early onset quelque chose?”
“Not that early. I don’t think I can go on visiting him anymore. I just can’t do it.”
Dench squeezed her thigh then caressed it. “Sure you can,” he said.
She stabbed out her cigarette in a coffee cup, then, turning, rubbed her hand down along Dench’s sinewy biceps and across his tightly muscled stomach, feeling hounded back into his arms, which she had never really left, and now his arms’ familiarity was her only joy. You could lose someone a little but they would still roam the earth. The end of love was one big zombie movie.
“Do you realize that if you smoke enough you will end up lowering your risk of uterine cancer?” she said.
“That’s a bad one,” said Dench. “The silent killer. Especially in men.”
“What did you do today?”
“I worked on some songs about my slavery-oppressed ancestors. I’m blaming the white man for my troubles.”
She thought of his father. “Well, in your case it’s definitely a white man.”
“For most people it is. That’s why we need more songs.”
“Life! It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it.”
“I wouldn’t have voted for it. I wouldn’t give it any stars. It’s like getting a book where the sexy passages are already underlined. Who wants that?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant. But she kissed him on his shoulder anyway. “Wouldn’t it be lovely just to fly out of here and live far away on a cloud together?”
“To be birds and see Gawwd!”
She had given up trying to determine his facetiousness level. She suspected it was all just habit and his true intent was unknown even to himself. “Yes! We could be birds in a little bird-house that had books and we could read them!” she exclaimed.
Dench turned his head quickly on the pillow to stare at her. “Perhaps we have that already,” he said. “But darlin, we ain’t seeing God.”
“Because God is off in some cybercafé, so tired from all those biblical escapades that now he just wants to sit back and Google himself all day.” She pulled her hand away from Dench since he had not reciprocated with his own. “If he’s not completely deaf to our cries, he’s certainly deaf in one ear.”
“For sure. Not just the hardware of the inner ear but the hairs and jelly further in: all shot.”
“You’re a strange boy.”
“You see? We’re getting past the glaze and right down to the factory paint here.”
She let a few days go by and then she resumed her stopping by at Milt’s on her coffee runs. Because summer had set in she was now bringing Dench iced coffee, but invariably the ice cubes would melt and she would just drink the whole thing herself. Milt still heated up his muffins but often needed her to drive him to doctors’ appointments as well as to other places, and so she ran his errands with him and watched him greet all the salespeople, the druggist, the dry-cleaning girl, all of whom he seemed to know. “I’m so glad my wife’s daughters are gone,” he said at one point as they were driving home. “I dread the house with them there. I’d rather just return to the cave of my own aloneness!”
“I know how you feel.”
“You have no idea,” he said and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek before he got out of the car. “They are as cold as they come. I mean, even the ice on Mars melts in springtime!”
Once she took the old man swimming. They went to a beach farther north on the lake, at a state park on a weekday, when there was no one there. “Don’t look!” he squealed as he took off his shirt and limp-jogged into the water, where he was safer than he was on land. He was not in bad shape, merely covered with liver spots, and his stomach was only slightly rounded and his breasts about the size of her own.
“How’s the water?” she called to him. A line of silver at the water’s edge sparkled in the sun. The sky was the deep belligerent blue of a hyacinth.
“Expect the unexpected!” he called back. She could see he’d once been a strong swimmer. His arms moved surely, bold, precise. Of course, when you expected the unexpected, it was no longer unexpected, and so you were not really following instructions. She admired his gameness. As she approached the water she saw that the silver line along the sand was the early die-off of the alewives: washed ashore gasping and still flipping on your foot as you walked. The dead lay in a shiny line upbeach, and if one of the smelt-like fish died closer to the waves it caught the light like the foil of a gum wrapper. Another putrid perplexity of the earth. She dove out anyway—to swim among the dying. She would pretend to be an aquarium act, floating among her trained, finned minions; if she imagined it any other way it was all too disgusting. She bobbed around a bit, letting the olive waves of the lake crest up and wash over her.
They picnicked back on shore. She had brought cheese sandwiches and club soda and difficult peaches: one had to bite sharply into the thick fuzzed skin of them to get to the juice. They sat huddled in their separate towels, on a blanket, everything sprinkled with sand, their feet coated in it like brown sugar.
“Too bad about the dead fish,” Milt said. “They’ll be gone next week but still. So may I!” He grinned.
Should she say “Don’t talk like that”? Should she in her bathing suit with her tattoos all showing feign a bourgeois squeamishness regarding conversations about death? “Please don’t talk like that,” she said, peach juice dripping down her chin.
“OK,” he said obediently. “I’m just saying: even Nature has her wickednesses.” He took out a flask she didn’t know he carried and poured her a little into a paper cup. “Here, have some gin. Goes in clean and straight—like German philosophy!” He smiled and looked out at the lake. “I was once a philosopher—just not a very good one.”
“Really?” The gin stung her lips.
“Terrible world. Great sky
. That always seemed the gist.” He paused. “I also like bourbon—the particular parts of your brain it activates. Also good for philosophy.”
She thought about this. “It’s true. Bourbon hits a very different place than, say, wine.”
“Absolutely.”
“And actually, red wine hits a different place from white.” She sipped her gin. “Not that I’ve made an intense study of it.”
“No, of course not.” He smiled and rinsed gin around on his gums.
Back at his house he seemed to have caught a chill and she put a blanket around him and he grabbed her hand. “I have to go,” she said.
A sadness had overtaken him. He looked at KC then looked away. “Shortly before my wife died she sat up in bed and began to shout out the names of all the sick children who had died on her watch. I’d given her a brandy and she just began reciting the names of all the children she had failed to save. ‘Charlie Pepper,’ she cried, ‘and Lauren Cox and Barrett Bannon and Caitlin Page and Raymond Jackson and Tom DeFugio, and little Deanna Lamb.’ This went on for an hour.”
“I have to go—will you be OK?” He had taken his hand away and was just staring into space. “Here is my number,” she said, writing on a small scrap of paper. “Phone me if you need anything.”
When he did not reply she left anyway, ignoring any anguish, locking the door from the inside.
Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready. Life got you sad. And then blood started coming from where it didn’t used to come. People revisited the deaths of others, getting ready to meet them in the beyond. KC herself imagined dying would be full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done. Though all was never said and done. That was the other part about death.
“I had the dog all day,” complained Dench, “which was no picnic. No day at the beach.”
“Well, I had Milt. He’s no kiss for Christmas.”
