The little people twirl about, the skirts of the women billowing. They’re in a good mood today: they nod at one another, they smile, they open and close their mouths as if they’re singing.
Wilma’s fully aware that these apparitions aren’t real. They’re only symptoms: Charles Bonnet’s syndrome, common enough at her age, especially in those with eye problems. She’s fortunate, because her manifestations – her Chuckies, as Dr. Prasad calls them – are mostly benign. Only rarely do these people scowl, or swell out of proportion, or dissolve into fragments. Even when they’re angry or sullen, their fits of ill temper surely can’t have anything to do with her, since the little folk never acknowledge her; which is also – says the doctor – par for the course.
She likes the miniature Chuckies, much of the time; she wishes they would talk to her. Be careful what you wish for, said Tobias when she shared this thought with him. Number one, once they start talking they might never shut up, and number two, who knows what they’d say? He then launched into an account of one of his past affairs; long past, needless to say. The woman was ravishing, with the breasts of an Indian goddess and the marble thighs of a Greek statue – Tobias is given to archaic, overblown comparisons – but every time she opened her mouth such banalities would emerge that he would almost burst with repressed irritation. It was a protracted and stressful campaign to get her into bed: chocolates were involved, in a heart-shaped golden box, the very best quality, no expense spared. Also champagne; but this had not made her more willing, only more fatuous.
According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect. The fact that a pricey dinner ought to be followed, as the night the day, by the compliant opening of their peerless legs was lost on them. Wilma has not considered it tactful to suggest to him that the blank stares and cluelessness might well have been acting on the part of these beauties, who would not be averse to a free meal if all it cost them was a widening of their huge, innocently dumb, heavily fringed eyes. She remembers confidences exchanged in ladies’ powder rooms, back when they were called “powder rooms”; she remembers conspiratorial tittering, she remembers helpful how-to hints exchanged concerning the gullibility of men, in between the lipsticking of mouths and the pencilling of eyebrows. But why upset suave Tobias by revealing all this? It’s too late for such inside information to be of practical use to him, and it would only tarnish his rose-tinted memories.
“I should have known you back then,” Tobias says to Wilma during his chocolates-and-champagne recitals. “What sparks we would have struck!” Wilma parses this in silence: is he saying that she’s intelligent, and therefore a quick lay? Or would have been then. Does he realize that a more easily offended woman might take this as an insult?
No, he does not realize. It’s meant to be a gallantry. He can’t help it, poor man, being partly Hungarian in origin, he claims; so Wilma lets him prattle on, divine breasts here, marble thighs there, and doesn’t comment crisply on his redundancies – as she might once have done – when he relates the same seduction over and over. We have to be kind to one another in here, she tells herself. We’re all we have left.
The bottom line is that Tobias can still see. She can’t afford to be annoyed by the irritating physical attractions of stale-dated stunners as long as Tobias can look out the window and tell her what’s going on down there in the grounds outside the imposing front door of Ambrosia Manor. She likes to be kept in the loop, insofar as there is one.
She squints at her big-numbers clock, then moves it to the side of her head where she can get a better view. It’s later than she thought, as always. She fumbles around on the night table until she locates her bridge and slips it into her mouth.
The little people, waltzing now, don’t even break stride: her fake teeth are of no interest to them. Or to anyone, come to think of it, except Wilma herself and possibly Dr. Stitt, wherever he may be now. It was Dr. Stitt who’d convinced her to have several of her about-to-splinter molars Roto-Rooted out and then to get the implants installed – fourteen or fifteen years ago, that must have been – so she’d have something to attach a bridge to, supposing she needed it in the future. Which he predicted she would, because her teeth, being pre-fluoridation, would shortly be crumbling away like wet plaster.
“You’ll thank me later,” he’d said.
“If I live that long,” she’d replied with a laugh. She’d still been at the age when she’d liked to make death into a conversational flippancy, thus showing what a lively, game old bird she was.
“You’ll live forever,” he’d said. Which had sounded more like a warning than a reassurance. Though maybe he was only anticipating future business from her.
But now it is later, and she does thank Dr. Stitt, silently, every morning. It would be dire to be toothless.
Smooth white smile inserted, she slides out of bed, feels with her toes for her terrycloth slippers, and shuffles her way to the bathroom. The bathroom is still manageable: she knows where everything is in there, and it isn’t as if she can’t see at all. From the corners of her eyes she can still get a working impression, though the central void in her field of vision is expanding, as she’s been told it would. Too much golf without sunglasses, and then there was the sailing – you get a double dose of the rays from the reflection off the water – but who knew anything then? The sun was supposed to be good for you. A healthy tan. They’d covered themselves in baby oil, fried themselves like pancakes. The dark, slick, fricasseed finish looked so good on the legs against white shorts.
Macular degeneration. Macular sounds so immoral, the opposite of immaculate. “I’m a degenerate,” she used to quip right after she’d received the diagnosis. So many brave jokes, once.
Putting her clothes on is still possible as long as there aren’t any buttons: two years ago, or is it longer, she weeded the buttons out of her wardrobe. There’s now Velcro throughout, and zippers too, which are fine as long as they’re end-stop zippers: slotting the little thingy into the other little thingy is no longer possible.
She smoothes her hair, feels for stray wisps. Ambrosia Manor has its own salon complete with hairdresser, thank providence, and she relies on Sasha there to keep her trimmed. The most worrisome item during her morning preparation is her face. She can scarcely make it out in the mirror: it’s like one of those face-shaped blanks that appeared on Internet accounts when you hadn’t added your picture. So no hope for the eyebrow pencil or the mascara, and hardly any for the lipstick, though on optimistic days she pretends to herself she can draw that on sightlessly. Should she chance it today? Maybe she’ll look like a clown. But if so, who would care?
She would. And Tobias might. And the staff, though in a different way. If you look demented they’re more likely to treat you as if you really are. So better to avoid the lipstick.
She finds the cologne bottle where it always resides – the cleaners have strict instructions not to move anything – and dabs herself behind the ears. Attar of Roses, with an undertone of something else, a citrus. She breathes in deeply: thank heavens she can still smell, unlike some of the others. It’s when you can’t smell any more that your appetite goes and you dwindle to nothing.
As she turns away she does manage to catch a glimpse of herself, or of someone: a woman disconcertingly like her own mother as she was in old age, white hair, crumpled tissue-paper skin and all; though, as the eyes are sideways, more mischievous. Possibly more malevolent as well, like an elf gone to the bad. That sideways glance lacks the candour of a full frontal gaze, a thing she will never see again.
Here comes Tobias, punctual as ever. They always have breakfast together.
He knocks first, like the courtly gentleman he purports to be. The time you should wait before entering a lady’s chamber, according to Tobias, is the time it would take the other man to dive under the bed. Appearances should be preserved when it comes to wives, several of wh
om have been undergone by Tobias. They were cheaters every one, though he doesn’t hold it against them any more because it would be hard to respect a woman who wasn’t desired by other men. He never let the wives know he knew, and he always enticed them back and made sure they were worshipping him again before giving them a sudden boot out the door, with no explanation, because why lower himself by accusing them? A firmly closed door was more dignified. That was the way to deal with wives.
In the case of mistresses, however, spontaneous emotion is likely to take over. A suspicious lover infuriated by jealousy and his own wounded honour is tempted to barge right in without knocking, and then there will be bloodshed, right there on the spot, with a knife or bare hands, or else in the form of duels, later.
“Did you ever kill anyone?” Wilma asked once, during this recitation.
“My lips are sealed,” Tobias replied solemnly. “But a wine bottle – a full wine bottle – can crush in a skull, at the temple. And I was a crack shot.”
Wilma kept her mouth still: she can’t see Tobias but he can see her, and a smirk would hurt him. She finds these kinds of details rococo, like the vanished gold chocolate boxes, and suspects Tobias of making them up, not out of whole cloth but from creaky, ornate operettas and once-fashionable continental novels and the reminiscences of dandyish uncles. He must think that naive, bland, North American Wilma finds him decadent and glamorous, quite the roué; he must think she swallows this stuff whole. But maybe he believes it himself.
“Come in,” she says now. A blob appears in the doorway. She regards it sideways, sniffs the air. It’s Tobias for sure, it’s his aftershave: Brut, if she’s not mistaken. Has her sense of smell become sharper as her eyesight has faded? Probably not, though it’s comforting to think so. “How lovely to see you, Tobias,” she says.
“Dear lady, you are radiant,” says Tobias. He advances, plants a kiss of greeting upon her cheek with his thin, dry lips. A few bristles: he hasn’t shaved yet, just splashed on the Brut. Like herself, he must be worried about how he smells: that acid, stale odour of aging bodies so noticeable when all the Ambrosiads are assembled in the dining room, their base note of slow decay and involuntary leakage papered over with applied layers of scent – delicate florals on the women, bracing spices on the men, the blooming rose or brusque pirate image inside each of them still fondly cherished.
“I hope you slept well,” says Wilma.
“I had such a dream!” says Tobias. “Purple. Maroon. It was very sexual, with music.”
His dreams are frequently very sexual, with music. “It ended well, I hope?” she says. She’s overusing the word hope today.
“Not very well,” says Tobias. “I committed a murder. It woke me up. What shall we have today? The oat creations, or the bran ones?” He never pronounces the actual names of the dry breakfast cereals in Wilma’s repertoire: he finds them banal. Soon he will make a remark about the absence of good croissants in this place, or indeed of any croissants whatsoever.
“You choose,” she says. “I’ll have a mixture.” Bran for the bowels, oats for the cholesterol, though the experts keep changing their minds about that. She hears him rummaging: he’s familiar with her small kitchenette, he knows where the packages are kept. Here at the Manor, lunch and dinner are served in the dining room, but they have their breakfasts in their own apartments; those of them in the Early Assisted Living wing, that is. In the Advanced Living wing, things are different. She hasn’t wished to imagine exactly how different.
There’s a clanking of plates, a rattle of cutlery: Tobias is setting out their breakfast on the small table over by the window. He’s a dark shape silhouetted against the bright glaring square of daylight.
“I’ll get the milk,” says Wilma. She can do that much, at least: open the mini-fridge door, locate the cool plasti-coated cardboard oblong, carry it to the table without spilling.
“It’s done,” says Tobias. Now he’s grinding the coffee, a miniature buzz-saw whirr. He doesn’t tell the story today about how much better it would be to grind the coffee in a hand grinder, a red one with a brass handle, as was the custom in his youth, or possibly in the youth of his mother. In somebody’s youth. Wilma is familiar with this red, brass-handled coffee grinder. It’s as if she once owned it herself, though she never did. Yet she feels its loss; it’s become part of her inventory, it’s joined the other objects that she has in fact lost.
“We should have eggs,” says Tobias. Sometimes they do, though the last occasion was a minor disaster. Tobias boiled the eggs but not enough, so Wilma made a shambles of hers, and it squirted all over her front. Taking the top off the shell is a precise operation: she can no longer aim the spoon with accuracy. Next time she’ll suggest an omelette, though that may be beyond the culinary skills of Tobias. Maybe if she directs him, step by step? No, too hazardous: she wouldn’t want him to get burned. Something in the microwave, perhaps; some baked French toast affair. A cheese strata; she used to make those, when she had a family. But how to find a recipe? And then follow it. Maybe there are audio recipes?
They sit at the table, munching their cereals, which are brittle and cindery and take a lot of chewing. The sound inside her head, thinks Wilma, is of crisp snow underfoot, or of Styrofoam packing peanuts. Maybe she should switch to a softer cereal option, like instant porridge. But Tobias might disdain her for even mentioning such a thing: he scorns anything instant. Bananas: she’ll try for bananas. They grow on trees, or plants, or bushes. He can’t possibly object to bananas.
“Why do they make them into circles?” Tobias says, not for the first time. “These oat things.”
“It’s the shape of an O,” Wilma says. “O for oat. It’s a sort of pun.” Tobias shakes his blobby head against the light.
“A croissant would be preferable,” he says. “These also are made in a shape, a crescent, from when the Moors almost captured Vienna. I do not see why …” But he breaks off. “Something is happening at the gate.”
Wilma has binoculars, sent to her by her Alyson for viewing birds, though the birds she had managed to view were mainly starlings and the binoculars aren’t of use to her any more. Her other daughter sends mostly slippers; Wilma has a glut of slippers. Her son sends postcards. He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that she can no longer read his handwriting.
She keeps the binoculars on the windowsill, and Tobias wields them to survey the grounds: the curved driveway; the lawn with its clipped shrubs – she remembers those from when she first came here, three years ago – the fountain with a replica of a famous Belgian statue, a naked angel-faced boy urinating into a stone basin; the high brick wall; the imposing gateway with its overhead arch and its two ostentatious, depressed-looking stone lions. The Manor was once a mansion in the countryside, back when people built mansions, back when there was a countryside. Hence the lions, most likely.
Sometimes there’s nothing to be seen by Tobias except the usual comings and goings. Every day there will be visitors – “civilians,” Tobias calls them – marching briskly from the guest car park towards the main door, bearing a potted begonia or geranium, hauling a young, reluctant grandchild, summoning up false cheer, hoping to get this rich-old-relative thing over with as fast as possible. There will be staff, both medical and cooking/cleaning, who drive in through the gate and then around to the staff parking and the side doors. There will be snazzily painted delivery vans bringing groceries and washed linens, and sometimes flower arrangements ordered up by guilty family members. The less dapper vehicles, such as the garbage collection trucks, have an ignominious back-entrance gate of their own.
Every once in a while there’s a drama. An inhabitant of the Advanced Living wing will escape despite all precautions, and will be seen wandering aimlessly, in pyjamas or partly clothed, peeing here and there – an activity welcome in a cherubic fountain ornament but not acceptable in a decrepit human being – and there will be a mild-mannered but efficient chase to surround the errant one and lead him back inside. Or h
er: sometimes it’s a her, though the men seem to take more initiative in escaping.
Or an ambulance will arrive and a brace of paramedics will hurry in, carrying their equipment – “like the war,” Tobias once remarked, though he must have been referring to films because he hasn’t been in any wars that Wilma is aware of – and then after a while they will exit at a more leisurely pace, wheeling a shape on a gurney. You can’t tell from here, says Tobias as he peers through the binoculars, whether the body is alive or dead. “Maybe you can’t even tell from down there,” he’s been known to add as a sepulchral joke.
“What is it?” Wilma asks now. “Is it an ambulance?” There haven’t been sirens: she’s sure of that, she still hears quite well. It’s at times like this that her disability is most discouraging to her. She’d rather see for herself; she doesn’t trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back. Protecting her, he’d call it. But she doesn’t want to be protected in that way.
Perhaps in response to her frustration, a phalanx of little men forms up on the windowsill. No women this time, it’s more like a march-past. The society of the tiny folk is socially conservative: they don’t let women into their marches. Their clothing is still green, but a darker green, not so festive. Those in the front rows have practical metal helmets. In the ranks behind them the costumes are more ceremonial, with gold-hemmed capes and green fur hats. Will there be miniature horses later on in the parade? It’s been known to happen.
Tobias doesn’t answer at once. Then he says, “Not an ambulance. Some sort of picketing. It looks organized.”
“Maybe there’s a strike,” says Wilma. But who among the workers at Ambrosia Manor would be striking? The cleaners would have the most reason, they’re underpaid; but they’re also the least likely, being illegal at worst and at best in strong need of the money.
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Page 22
