Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  “I’m Frank Bascombe,” I say, half whispering. “I think Eddie’s expecting me.”

  “All right,” she says as I come in. “Finesse,” she says, which I take to be her name. “I’m his hospice nurse. He been kickin’ up dust, waitin’ for you.” She steps off, leading me to the right, out of the shadowy foyer and the main house’s front parlor—Greek Revival, pocket doors, bookcases, a sunny breakfast nook visible through doors to the back. Everything in the original part’s been done in ultramodern-’70s style—shiny tube-steel and leather chairs, the walls hand-painted in bold, jagged red-and-green striping and hung with large black-and-white photographs of the Serengeti, wattle huts, Mount K, an immense and motionless river with rhinos cavorting, and lots of artifacts around—a ceremonial zebra-skin drum-table, spears clustered in an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, walls of hollow-eyed masks and shields and breastplates made of leopard fur—the dark continent’s designer side. Everything’s silent and pristine. No life’s transpired here, possibly, since the lady of the house flew back to square-head land, leaving it as her monument.

  Finesse’s size and swaying stride create a peppermint airstream, where I’m following behind. “I thought that funny l’il preacher—whatever he was—wasn’t ever gonna leave,” she’s saying as if she and I know each other. “Fice. Idn’t that a dog’s name? I don’t b’lieve I met you. I did meet some of them.” She’s leading me through a dark screening theater and on into a paneled man-study with Vanity Fair prints, crossed wooden tennis rackets, the (apparently) complete Harvard Classics and a big Cape buffalo’s head staring somberly down off the wall. We pass then into a club room—snooker table, highboy chairs, Tiffany lamps, deep-cranberry walls, cue racks, chalks, a triangle of red balls on a perfect green nap. Again, nothing seems in use. Plans were made. Plans abandoned.

  “I’m an old friend.” I’m barely keeping up. We pass through double doors to a small, expensively lit seafaring chamber—brass-framed charts, brass fixtures, brass telescopes, windlasses, monkeys’ fists, boat hooks, belaying pins, fife rails—everything but an oubliette. Plus walls of big blow-up glossies of Eddie on his beloved Tore Holm yawl, the Jalina, christened to honor the departed wife and long-ago lost to creditors. Eddie is distinctive (if miniaturized) as the doughty helmsman of the big seventy-footer, bowsprit (or whatever) to the bluster and spray, sails bellied, the commodore in white ducks and shades, deliriously happy, Jalina clutching his shoulders, her straight blondy tresses streaming behind (revealing a face a bit too small for her shoulders). I could never prize anything so much. A career selling houses lets you know you can live with a lot less than you think.

  “Okay, lemme just say this,” Finesse says, coming about just as we’re about to pass through another double doors, possibly to Eddie’s dying room, where his dying days are upon him. Finesse would be my choice for nurse when the time arrives—big as a tractor, strong as a bison, bristling with authority and competence, yet also with outsized no-nonsense empathies acquired in a lifetime of shepherding rich white people out of this teary vale with a minimum of bother. Possibly she has a business card.

  Finesse’s protruding jaundice-y eyes and expansive forehead lean forward at me now as important signifiers. “Mr. Medley is very ill. He’s ’bout dead.” She elevates her chin, her plush mouth in a tight, pious line to represent 1. Gravity; 2. Respect; 3. Solemnity; 4. Sorrow; 5. Consideration; 6. Submission; 7. Candor; 8. Lament. Plus a hundred inexpressibles that come into play (or might) when we elect to face the final hours of another.

  “I know,” I say, meekly. Now that I’m in death’s maritime anteroom, I want to be a hundred miles away from it. “Eddie announced he was dying on the radio.”

  “Okay. I know ’bout all that foolishness.” Finesse’s maximum breasts expand almost audibly against her nurse’s smock, advancing her stethoscope disk out toward me then back again. “But he’s happy. He don’t mind it. His brain’s goin’ and goin’. So you don’t have to be sorrowing. Because he’s not.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I don’t expect to be here long.” I hope. Finesse, I see, wears a thin gold wedding band barely visible deep in her finger flesh. Somewhere there’s a Mr. Finesse. Trenton, no doubt. A tough, wiry, agreeable man she bosses around and reminds every day how things are going to be in this world and the next. I can only imagine how much he loves her—all there is to love.

  “You stay just as long in there as you want to,” Finesse says. She still has the yellow sponge in hand. “It ain’t like you makin’ him tired. He’s already tired.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then, here we all go.” She reaches for the knob, pushes back the door to reveal . . . Eddie (I guess) . . . propped up in bed, looking not like Glenn Ford but like a little bespectacled monkey who’s reading The Economist.

  “Who’s that?” the tiny creature who might be Eddie says, as if alarmed, his mouth making a shocked, half-open, toothy grimace, his brow furrowing above a pair of reading glasses, his little spidery fingers setting The Economist out of the way so he can see. He looks terrifying and terrified. Almost nothing Eddie-ish is recognizable.

  “Who you think it is?” Finesse says archly. “Yo’ ole man-friend who called you up this mornin’.”

  “Who?” Eddie croaks.

  “It’s Frank, Olive.” With overpowering reluctance, I make an awkward step-in through the door, my gaze fixed on him. My mouth and cheeks are working at a smile that won’t quite materialize. I stuff my hands in both pants pockets as if they’re cold. I’m already doing this badly. I lack the skill set. Who’d want it?

  “Now don’t start actin’ like you don’t know who it is,” Finesse says bossily, moving with casual, mountainous authority toward the foot of the metal bed brought in by her hospice team. Part of the death package. Brusquely, she re-situates the metal drip stand Eddie’s connected to and that’s delivering clear fluid out of a collapsible sachet into a port on the back of his cadaverous left hand. Eddie’s covered to his chin in a hospital-blue sheet and is barely detectable beneath it.

  “Okay, okay. I know.” He coughs without flailing an arm over his mouth, which would be better.

  “And cover up yo’ mouth, Mr. Nasty!” Finesse gives the minuscule Eddie a frosty frown, as if he can’t hear her.

  “I’m not catching,” Eddie’s little head says. It’s what he said on the phone. His beleaguered eyes dart to me, his smile becoming conspiratorial. He is our Olive underneath.

  “Who says you wasn’t catchin’? I don’t know that.” Finesse puts one large hand behind Eddie’s scrawny neck, then another low down on his back and moves him upward onto his slab of pillows like a marionette, revealing bony shoulders, more of his small arms, and a bit of emaciated chest and ribs underneath his hospital smock the same bland, green color as hers. “Sit on up,” she says irritably. “You all scrunched down. How you s’pose to talk to your friend?” Finesse hasn’t looked my way since I came in. Eddie is her lookout. Not me. “You can come on and get close to him,” she says—to me—without looking. “He might cough on you, though, so be careful.” She has the sponge tucked under her arm.

  “I don’t remember you being so goddamn tall,” Eddie croaks, up on his pillows. He is still monkey-ish. I edge closer without wanting or meaning to. The room is a bedroom. Heavy curtains block the windows. Pale outside light seeps around the edges, turning the air greenish. It’s possible to think it’s three in the morning, not ten A.M. Eddie has a gooseneck lamp shining onto where he was reading his Economist. His bed is cluttered with books, newspapers, Christmas cards, a copy of Playboy, a laptop, a plastic player that pipes music to his ear via a wire, but lying unused on the sheet. A tiny, un-majestic, plastic Christmas tree sits on his bed table, something Finesse has no doubt bought at CVS and brought along. Elsewhere on the bed are scattered a bunch of what look like brochures—the top one proposing “Best Buys in Kolkata”—as if Eddie was planning a trip. Fike, little Christian brigand, has left behind a shiny pamphlet with a red
cross on its front above the words “We Appeal to You.” I’ve brought nothing, not even my full self.

  “Look at that shit,” Eddie rasps, his voice clipped and high-pitched after coughing. He’s gesturing behind me at two big TVs, bracketed high up, side by side, over the door I just came through and that Finesse is now gliding back out of, saying “Y’all just carry on y’all talkin’. I’ll be in here.” Both TVs are going but silent. On one, a group of big smiling white men in business suits and cowboy hats is crowded behind the podium of the stock exchange, soundlessly ringing in another day’s choker profits and looking blameless. On the other is an aerial view of The Shore. Surf sudsy. Beaches empty. The famous roller coaster, up to its knees in ocean. Somewhere down there my wife is at present counseling grievers. Possibly everything to a dying man is an emblem of the same thing: it’s all a lot of shit.

  Eddie’s commenced coughing again, though he also seems to be laughing. He’s shaking his head, trying to talk. “We don’t really achieve much clarity, do we, Basset Hound?” His laughter’s encountering serious obstacles down deep. “I don’t think . . .” (cough, grind, gag, gulp) “that information’s . . .” (last laugh attempt, then the deep “Uh-ooo” groan I heard on the phone) “. . . that information’s really power, do you?”

  “Maybe not. I haven’t thought much about it.”

  “Why would you?” Eddie manages. “Everybody knows everything. It’s probably better.” He subsides back into his bunched pillows and goes silent.

  Eddie’s the poster boy for death-warmed-over. No one was ever intended to look like Eddie and be breathing—his facial skin gone to parchment, his eyes deep in bony, zombie-sockets, his temples caved. Someone (Finesse) has smeared Vaseline on his clean-shaven cheeks to keep him from what? Drying up? Liquefying? His face glistens evilly. The whole room feels soggy and muggy, the breathable milieu of the soon-to-be-gone. Why did I come here when I could’ve stayed home, humming Copland and practicing my Narpool? Just because I could? That’s not good enough.

  And where’s the mellow-voiced male companion I talked to on the phone? Obviously Finesse has taken his place. I miss him even without knowing him.

  On his bed table beside the pathetic plastic Christmas tree, sit cluttered all the odious sick-room implements Eddie needs in order to die better—tissues, a covered metal tray, a silver beaker with a white flexible straw for him to get a sip. Several printed prescription containers. Though there’re no resuscitative trappings—no wall defibrillator or electric paddles to stand clear of, no digital gauges to tick off the heart’s gradual sink-sink-sink to sayonara. Only a shiny new walker and an empty wheelchair folded into the corner. The patient’s not walking out of here in a better frame of mind.

  Eddie, however, has also dyed his thick hair as black as tar. Though the dye, something else Finesse grabbed at the CVS, has run below Eddie’s hairline, making him look even weirder—worse than he’s going to look once he breathes his last. At the end, life does not become him.

  Strangely—to me, anyway—just beneath the wall TVs hangs a color picture of Smiley Obama, big teeth white as aspirins, elbows faux athletically tight-in to his skinny ribs, bending forward shaking hands with a small, grinning, gray-haired man who used to be Eddie. Behind them hangs a square red-and-gray banner with MIT Entrepreneurs Club For Barack printed on it. I’m sure Fike took it in.

  “So.” Eddie’s staring upward at the blank ceiling. He coughs smally, and with his spectral fingers pulls his sheet closer to his chin, straining the tubing to his hand. Possibly he’s practicing being a corpse. “How are you, Frank?”

  “Pretty good,” I say, whispering. Why?

  “What’re you reading?” Eddie breathes in deeply. A rusty-metal clank noise comes out of him, not—it seems—through his mouth.

  “I like to read the letters of famous writers,” I say. It’s true. “I feel like I’m in on an interesting conversation. I’m reading Larkin’s letters to his girlfriend. He was an anti-Semite, a racist, and a cad. I find that pretty interesting.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eddie grunts. Not interested. Another small cough. “I got this crud flying through that goddamn volcano ash from London a few years ago. Or, who knows, maybe the goddamn hurricane did it. I don’t know. Nothing else makes sense.”

  I pause. Not likely. “Maybe so.”

  Eddie moves his small left foot to the side and out from under his bedsheet. The top of his foot is angrified, dried and scrawny—vestigial. He wiggles his toes and raises his head to give a look and re-affiliate with his foot’s existence. For some reason—it’s an awful thought—I think of Eddie being helped out of his bed in his gaping green smock (to get to the john) and exposing his awful ass and poor, same-sized dick. I would avert my eyes.

  “You wrote a book, didn’t you?” Eddie returns his scalded foot to the covers’ protection.

  “A long time ago,” I say. “Two. I wrote two. I put the second one in a desk drawer and locked it and burned the desk.” Not true but true enough.

  “I wonder,” Eddie says, his brow and mouth for a moment relaxed. “I always wonder. I was an engineer.” The past tense naturally fits the moment. “I wonder, when you write a book, how do you know when you’ve finished it? Do you know ahead of time? Is that always clear? It baffles me. Nothing I did had an end.”

  This of course is the question my students used to ask thirty years ago when, for a few fierce months, I taught at a small New England college while my first marriage circled down the drain in the aftermath of our son’s death. Why they were interested in that always baffled me, since they stood at the bright beginning of their privileged lives, had never finished anything of importance and possibly never would. Eddie is/was (he’s both) probably one of those people who wants to know all about everything he’s doing at the precise moment he does it. In this case dying.

  “Endings always seemed pretty arbitrary to me, Eddie. I wasn’t very good at them. I’m not the only person who said so.”

  Eddie’s little raisin eyes move slowly my way behind his smudged glasses. A look of giddy reproach. He is an awful sight—dyed hair, Vaselined cheeks, Jolly Roger smile of doomed intensity. Though he can still cerebrate and feel reproach. “You mean you just stopped when you felt like it?”

  “Not exactly. I asked myself if I had anything more to say—if I’d gotten myself fully expressed. And if the answer was yes, I stopped. You bet. But if I didn’t, I kept on putting words down.”

  “Doesn’t sound right,” Eddie says. He coughs three shallow, staccato gaks, then gropes for a tissue from the box on the bed table. He gaks again and deposits something ungodly into a fold of the tissue, then wipes a bit of it back on his lips. Probably he’s ready to start in again about there being too few people dying, and how we need to do something about it pronto. He’s still trying.

  I hear Finesse in the next room. She’s left the door open to keep tabs on us and is talking on her phone. “I thought he’d come up and get me, okay?” she’s saying sternly. “I thought I knew him. But you can’t ever think you know nobody. You know what I’m sayin’? I mean, if I’m s’posed to fuck a sixty-year-old man, it’s damn sure gon’ be my husband. Uh-huh.”

  Eddie’s gaze has wandered back to the TVs. One’s tuned to evil-empire Fox. The other, to blandly see-it-your-way CNN. Fox has begun showing the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, where half the world is on the ice below a preposterously large and lighted Christmas tree. CNN’s rehearsing last weekend’s NFL offerings. My sudden fear is that Eddie’s literary interest means he’s about to hit me up to read something—something he’s written—his own memoir, or a “novel” whose central character’s an inventor named “Eric.” Once you publish a book, even a hundred years back and have lost the sight in both eyes, you’re still fair game.

  Finesse’s big coifed head suddenly appears in the door from the seafaring room. She’s holding her red cell phone in her hand. “You all still alive in there? You awful quiet.” She looks pityingly in at us. “I d
on’t hear no laughin’ and tellin’ jokes. You ain’t got all serious, have you?” She gives me a mock-serious frown. “I don’t want to have to give both you an enema. He done had his. My sister up in Newark says it’s a big storm comin’ on. I hope neither one of y’all’s plannin’ a Christmas trip.” I am. She disappears again.

  “You know, they’re not keeping me alive here, Frank,” Eddie says—hoarse, his voice strained and boyish. “Hospice doesn’t do that. Life just happens or it doesn’t. Bravery’s not involved. It’s interesting. Everybody ought to do it at least once.” Eddie’s deviled, dyed-hair, Vaseline-smudged face looks shocked, as if he’s trying to laugh again, but can only register alarm. “Oh,” he manages. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”

  “Can I do anything for you, Eddie?” I’ve inched closer to his bedside but am not inclined to touch him.

  “Like what?” Eddie croaks.

  “An enema.”

  Eddie’s eyes snap at me. “You’d probably like it.”

  “Not all of it,” I say. “Ole Olive. You’ve got yourself in a pickle here, haven’t you?”

  “Do you think so?” Eddie says, his parched lips curled.

  Finesse laughs at something her sister in Newark has had to say. “I was never a good sleeper, anyway,” she says and laughs raucously.

  Eddie takes a deep clattering breath. Each one of these could be his last. Eddie could pop off as dead as a mallet with me standing here pointless, hardly knowing him. “Mr. Medley expired while joking with an unidentified man about enemas.”

  Audible outside the house, across the soggy, puddly grounds of casa Eddie, comes the lonely ping-ping-ping and guttural heave ’n’ hump of a heating oil truck. Skillman’s—I’ve seen it when driving over. It’s making a delivery, possibly to this very domicile. I hope my Sonata’s not in the way when the driver starts backing up without looking.