“Who is it?”
“Janet Rossi,” I said. “She has cystic fibrosis and maybe a week to live.”
The woman moved her eyes back to the canvas. The doctor’s hard gaze flicked across it for a second, and then came to rest on me. I knew I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that, if you could judge by the good doctor’s expression at that moment, he was not a warm man. An exquisite mechanic, brave maybe; maybe as disciplined as the gods. Surely he had done more good for the world than a million people like me, but it was as if, in order to do what he did, he’d had to guard himself against the softening effects of sorrow and failure, against his own humanity, his own death. There’s a certain price you pay for that, and I thought I could read that price in the hard line of his lips.
“How did you get this address?”
“I hired a private detective,” I ad-libbed. “The hospital wouldn’t give it out. All the hospital would say is that there is one chance for her-a living lobar transplant-and there is one surgeon in New England who can do the operation.”
“She has cepacia?”
“Yes.” I watched him. “As of yesterday afternoon she’s tenth on the list for a cadaveric, she won’t come close to living long enough to get one.”
“I’m retired,” he said. “Sorry.”
“The only other surgeon who could do it is in New York. Janet won’t survive a trip to New York.” I looked at the woman, but if there was any well of sympathy in her, she wasn’t letting me near the pump. She avoided my eyes, studied the painting for another little while, and then she said, “I’m going in to shower, Leski. It’s nice, though, isn’t it?” He nodded. She did not look at us, and walked up the path and up the stairs and through the front door.
“I know you’re retired. And I know there’ll always be one more and one more you could do, but this woman has been fighting her whole life. From about the age of six weeks she’s been through things that most people-”
“I know the disease, thank you.”
“I know you know it, but-”
“You two are the potential donors, I suppose.”
Gerard said, “Yes.”
“Blood relatives?”
“Friends. A fiancé and a friend.”
“You’re the fiancé?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s my painting. I paint. I’m a painter. We want to have children. Adopt. Look, I’m sorry we came to your house. We’re not criminals and we’re not crazy, and you can keep the painting either way, yes or no, because of what you’ve done for other…you know…I swear to God you’ll never see either of us again.”
He just watched me from beneath the dark wool hat, blue eyes close-set beside a sharp nose. He said, “The procedure ties up three operating rooms, three teams of surgeons at two different hospitals. It puts at risk the lives of two healthy individuals. It costs between a quarter of a million and a million dollars, not counting the follow-up care. She’ll have to take antirejection drugs for the rest of her life and the potential side effects from those drugs are manifold-renal failure, tremors, bruising, digestive troubles, weight gain, bone loss, diabetes, risk of opportunistic infection.”
“I know all that,” I said.
“And I suppose you also know the survival rate for cepacia patients?”
“Forty percent are alive after two years,” Gerard said. “But the data sample is small.”
“And do you know how fondly the insurance companies look upon those kind of numbers?”
“Your survival rates are better,” Gerard said.
“How do you know?”
“I did some research.”
I looked at Gerard then. Every drop of his usual abrasive and needy goofiness had disappeared. He was like a fact, standing there, a challenge incarnate. He wasn’t blinking.
“Doctor Ouajiballah said he’d go to bat with the insurance company if you’re the surgeon,” I put in.
“Ouajiballah said that?”
“Gave me his word.”
“Gave you this address, too, if I’m not mistaken?”
“Yes.”
He smirked. His horse nickered. “No private detective, then?”
“No.”
“Any other falsehoods involved here?”
“None. Except I’m Entwhistle Fine Arts.”
He looked out past the horse to the expanse of frozen pasture. He should have been chilled by then, standing there in the cold air after a hard run, but there was an odd stillness about him. You couldn’t imagine him being chilled, or afraid, or making a mistake, or admitting to having made a mistake. Exactly the kind of guy you wanted if you or someone you loved were about to be cut open. For probably a full thirty seconds he didn’t speak to us or move, and then, without looking at us, he said, “I’ll take the painting-my wife liked it-and I’ll call you within twenty-four hours with an answer.”
“Fine,” I said, and he cut me off when I started to thank him.
“I will tell you I’m leaning toward no.”
“Why?” Gerard said.
The doctor turned his head and sent Gerard a look that was lined with ugliness, and I could see the pride in his pale eyes as clearly as if it had slithered up his spine and out through the front of his pupils.
“Oops, sorry,” Gerard said, not very sincerely. I saw something in my friend then, some old bad energy from the streets where he had been brought up. I did not know if the doctor could see it. “We’re sure you have your reasons. Look, let me carry this into the house for you while Jake closes up the box and cleans up this mess. And then you’ll never see either of us again unless you decide to cut us open.”
“I wouldn’t cut you open,” the doctor said. “Someone else does that. I cut her open.”
That’s comforting, I almost said. In fact, I came within an absolute whisker of saying it, because I had just given away a painting that meant everything to me, and was going to get nothing in return, and because, by then, I felt I was in the presence of a thin slice of something almost hideous between two pieces of remarkable talent. Gerard felt it, too, I knew that. We had our own proud serpents pressing out through our eyeballs. I thought of Janet pursing her lips. I said, “Again, our apologies. I know we’ve intruded and I appreciate it that you’re even willing to think it over. My mother was a doctor-Judith Entwhistle-and I know she would have been pissed as hell if the friends of a patient ever came driving up to her house asking for special care.”
“I appreciate it, too,” Gerard said, but there was a note of disgust in his voice. He was hoisting the painting over his head, just pressing in against the outside edges with the palms of his hands, not a fingerprint anywhere, showing off his upper-body strength. He walked up the path that way, two steps ahead of the good doctor.
I picked up the bubble wrap and plastic sheeting and jammed it into my homemade crate. Threw in two of the wing nuts and bolts and twisted the other two in place. I sat in the truck with the heater on and looked at the horse in the pasture-creature of incredible grace. I had a few sketches of her at home, photographs. I could try to make another painting, though there is a difference, painting someone who is right there in front of you, alive.
Gerard stayed inside the mansion for eight or ten minutes-giving detailed hanging instructions, I guessed. At last, I heard his boots on the gravel, then the passenger door closing. I put the truck in gear and we rattled down the long driveway, onto Madison Road, back in the direction we had come, past the library, past mansion row, and then down into the upper class.
“I see sufficient reason for hope, Colonel,” he said.
“Not a prayer.”
“I worked him a little.”
“Tell me you didn’t talk to him about Giselle.”
Gerard shook his head. He never mentioned Giselle’s name, under any circumstances. “I complimented his horse,” he said. “You should have seen his eyes light up. Then I made my face ugly-you know how I do, you know how much work it takes-and I asked him if he remembered
that fabulous scene from The Godfather, Part One. The horse’s bloody head under the sheets. His wife was watching, fresh from her shower. I said it in a happy voice, my crazy happy voice. I made my eyes just the tiniest bit crazy, like it was just a little goofy joke.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
“We’ll end up in jail.”
WHEN WE WERE BACK in the busyness of downtown Boston, Gerard turned serious, which happens to him about once every lunar cycle. I always know when this turning-serious is coming because he has a certain way of tapping his left work boot in a slow, steady rhythm. These are the kinds of things you learn about people when you build houses with them for a lot of years, smash fingers with them, drop $650 replacement windows when they are holding the other side, find some ingenious way of making up for an architect’s oversight after you’ve spent an hour cursing, put in a very hard week of hammering and then go out someplace and have a cranberry juice with a twist of lime and tell lame jokes.
“You know,” he said, in what I think of as his “normal” voice, “I like what we do pretty well, I enjoy it. But I think if I ever come into a lot of money someday-I don’t know how that could ever happen; maybe we’ll buy an old triple-decker someplace and fix it up and sell it for a huge profit-then what I want to do is open a nightclub for crippled and deformed people. A place where they can go and dance and listen to music and have a drink and not worry about anyone looking at them, you know? I’ve had this dream since college. Handsome people, pretty people, people who can walk right-we wouldn’t let them in the door. Just men and women in wheelchairs, legless people, spastics, hunchbacks. I mean it. That’s my real dream, if you want to know.”
“It’s a good dream,” I said. We drove a little ways. I thought about his dream. I said, “You don’t have your girls this weekend, am I right?”
“The colonel is correct.”
6
THAT AFTERNOON I called my apartment from the job site every half hour. Gerard and I were within about one full workday of finishing Jacqueline’s addition, and when she came home from her afternoon class and saw how close we were, she went floating through the rooms with her arms held out like the wings of a gliding falcon. It was our turn to watch and smile. She stood at different windows, she paced off part of the sunny second-floor room where her bed would be, opening and closing a beautiful little cherry cabinet Gerard had fashioned for a corner of her new bathroom. It had been a nice project. Besides building the two stories of new rooms, we’d sort of reached into the adjacent part of the old structure and cleaned up some of the messy work there from a hundred years ago-taken out old rough-sawn, weird-dimension studs and bulging lath and plaster and replaced them with new spruce two-by-fours and Sheetrock, leveled the old floors in two rooms so they matched up evenly with the new ones, improved the insulation in the part of the wall cavity we could get to. Everything had come out smoothly, almost perfectly. But I had the cold understanding then, watching her enjoy our work, that I would always think of Janet when I drove past this place.
That afternoon I hung two interior doors and put the lock-set assemblies in-I remember it very well. Hanging doors is not a simple job, the tolerances are small. My mind would stay on the work in my hands for a few seconds at a time, then swing away. I had to take one of the doors down and put it back up again four times before I got it right. Gerard did not make one joke.
When I came home at the end of the day, there was one message on the machine-Jeremy Steams, who owned the gallery where I showed my paintings. He did not know anything about Janet. He was calling to tell me that he was using one of my paintings in a half-page ad in Art in America, something he’d been promising he’d do for the past two and a half years. When I called him back, I tried to sound pleased.
I showered and changed and drove across town to the hospital. Janet lay on her side, raking in one shallow breath after another, occasionally lifting the oxygen mask to ask for water, for help turning onto her other side, or for her mother or me to hold the metal pan up to her mouth so she could spit. I wanted in a terrible way to tell her about our trip to Dover. Every now and then she would make eye contact with me or with her mother and it tore through me and I kept wrestling with myself about whether it was better or worse to give her hope. I pictured myself telling her, and then Vaskis saying no, and then having to tell her he had said no, or having to tell her he’d said yes but we couldn’t find a second donor.
On the way home, I thought I should have done it, though, at least should have let her know we were trying everything we could try, that there was still some last little glimmer.
At a specialty shop on Harvard Avenue, I bought a bottle of white Argiolas and some bread and cheese and two Granny Smith apples. I went home and made up a plate and poured a glass and sat in the kitchen, not eating and not drinking, looking at the telephone. Gerard had promised not to call. Janet’s mother wouldn’t call unless it was an emergency. I took a sip of wine, carried the glass with me into the painting room, and sat on the sofa there. I got back up and paced, drank a little bit, put the food away when it was clear I wasn’t going to be eating any of it. I looked out different windows, poured a little more wine. Hours passed this way. At quarter after midnight, because I knew I would not be able to sleep, and knew I couldn’t paint, and knew it was too late for any good news, I wrote Ellory another note telling him what was going on, and when that was done I called my sister. She answered on the third ring.
“Lizbeth, it’s Jake.”
“Jake who?” she said, in a voice just absolutely dripping.
“Your brother.”
“Mum alright?”
“She’s the same. She asks for you every time I see her.”
Lizbeth paused. I thought she might be turning down her TV or something, or talking to a client, and then she said, “Here comes the guilt trip, sailing across the sand-shit desert. Mum asking for me. You visiting, me not visiting. Same old sand-shit, snake-talk Jakie.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Some of us have the money to fly, you know, and some of us just don’t.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, really.”
“Right. My good-boy, snake-talk brother.”
“Look, if you want to come back to see her, I’ll send you a ticket.”
“Send me the money and let me buy my own ticket. I can get a deal here. I have friends who work in the airlines.”
“I’ll send a ticket tomorrow if you want. I’m not sending money.”
As soon as those last four words were out of my mouth, my sister started to yell, a quick crescendo about how nothing mattered to me but money, and how all I thought about was money, and how she was sick and tired of being the only daughter and being treated like a baby because of that, and how hard she worked, and how easy I’d always had it, and just on and on and on. The four words had been a mortar round, and the mortar round had blasted a hole in the wall of a dam, and now a whole lake of bitterness was pouring out.
“Lizbeth,” I said, three or four times, but the bitterness drowned me out. It was not exactly a new experience for me. My sister had been systematically destroying herself for a decade by then, and over the course of that decade I had sent money, and self-help books, and humorous cards, and I’d made well-meaning suggestions, and talked to friends of mine who were therapists, and passed on their advice, and stayed up half the night worrying about her, and fielded unpleasant phone calls from bail bondsmen, bikers, bookmakers, and casino security types. None of it had changed the trajectory of her fiery downward arc by so much as a fraction of a degree.
I knew, once she started using the word “coward,” that we were close to the end, so I did my best then to try to listen beyond the words and not have bad thoughts toward her. I tried to match the notes in her voice to the notes that had been there when she was a young girl, a happy soul, joy to be around. It didn’t work.
“You’re a coward and you’ve always been a co
ward and you call up like the coward you are and you should be ashamed of yourself for the way you treat me…”
And so on for another minute or two, top volume, before she slammed the telephone down in her sad little apartment in Reno, and the dial tone droned across the lower forty-eight.
I turned out the lights and lay in bed, looking at the shapes the shadows made against the wash of street light on the ceiling, listening to the muted sounds-car engines, horns, conga drums from downstairs. There was no real possibility of going to sleep, I knew that, but I held out some hope for twenty minutes or so, and then sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, thinking I would go to Betty’s for a doughnut and some company, or go back to the hospital. The phone rang. I let it ring twice. Sometimes, if Lizbeth was high enough or angry enough, she would decide after stewing for a while that I had hung up on her and she’d call back with more shouting. At which point I usually pulled the phone cord out of the wall.
I answered on the third ring and heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice saying my name. The bedside clock read 12:56. I thought it was the hospital calling. I was already moving toward my shoes. But the woman said: “I’m Louise. Doctor Vaskis’s wife. Calling unconscionably late. He says he’ll do it Monday morning if you and your friend pass all the tests you have to pass. He said to tell you he’ll call the other doctor, what was his name-”
“Ouajiballah.”
“Yes. He’ll call him in the morning.”
“What’s today?” I said.
She laughed a carefree laugh. “As of about fifty minutes ago, Friday.”
“Tell him for me that…tell him I can’t find the words to thank him.”
“I softened him up,” she said. “So you can thank me, too. He didn’t really want to retire, you know. He’s been a little bit grumpy since he decided to. That was his whole life, saving people. It’s not something you just give up.”
“No…I imagine…Thank you. Thanks…I-”
A Little Love Story Page 19
