33
The cabin was on a service road outside Great Barrington, set back from traffic and attached to a barn, and Pru felt as if she were being introduced to Walter afresh: to Walter from childhood, and to Walter’s parents, now dead, and to Walter’s brother, whom she’d heard about from Camille, who lived with his wife across the Hudson, in Parsippany, photographs of whom were strewn about the house, some in frames, some loose. Board games—Boggle, Risk, Bananagrams, Othello—lay on the floor; a single cleat was abandoned behind a bed; a pair of nunchucks sat in the game room. In the basement, the Ping-Pong table stood with the net at half-mast, the paddles beside it, as if someone had only just stopped playing, as if Walter’s dead parents were about to materialize and summon the boys upstairs. “We haven’t really updated since nineteen eighty-two.”
“Or cleaned up,” Pru said. “And you say you rent this place out?”
Walter pointed to a closet. “When the renters come we throw the junk in there. But it’s true. I haven’t gotten the hang of Airbnb. This could be a cash cow. If only I was better at milking it.” He sat down on a bench. “Do you want to go for a run?”
“I didn’t bring my running shoes.”
“What size are you?”
“An eight.”
“My brother’s an eight. I can probably scrounge something up.”
But an eight in women’s wasn’t an eight in men’s, and as Pru made her way along the dirt road, Walter breathing steadily beside her, she felt as if she were running in clown’s shoes.
They stopped for coffee at Fuel, where Walter stretched on the concrete, moving one leg forward, then the other. A couple of drops of sweat hung from his beard. A young woman walked up Main Street, her yoga mat like a baguette tucked beneath her arm.
Back at the house Walter said, “I’ll drive into town and pick up some groceries. You can stay back here and freshen up.”
Once he’d gone, she thought she should shower: she’d worked up a sweat running to and from town. She brought her bag into the bedroom. She wondered when Walter had last had sex. More recently than she had, no doubt, but how much more recently, she didn’t want to know.
She set up her toiletries in the bathroom: her toothbrush, her dental floss, her deodorant, her makeup remover. She sat down to pee, only to realize she didn’t need to. She would be here for two days: would she need to take a shit? She thought of summer camp, defecating in public, in a bunk full of girls. She got up from the toilet to make sure the door was locked. She sat down again, and this time she peed.
She checked her phone, but there were no messages. Ginny and Rafe were staying with Spence for the weekend. She’d told Ginny she was going to the country to spend some time with a friend.
In the kitchen, Walter soaked the trout in a marinade. She chopped the ends off asparagus. She shredded some romaine hearts and placed them in a bowl.
He handed her a glass of wine.
“To the weekend,” she said.
“To the weekend.” They clinked glasses, and she took a sip. A smudge of lipstick came off on her glass.
He stood behind her as she sliced tomatoes and mixed oil and vinegar for a dressing. He rested his hands on her shoulders. His breath was against her neck. She turned around and kissed him. His beard grazed her throat. She tasted wine on his tongue. How soft his eyelids were, the brush of his nose, his chest pressed to hers. She thought she might love him. Was it possible she was falling in love? She said, “I got lipstick on you,” and she ran her finger across his chin.
Upstairs, she brushed her teeth and gargled some mouthwash. She cupped her hand over her mouth so she could smell her breath.
They kissed beside the bed. Then their shirts were off and kicked across the floor and she was yanking off his pants. Her bra was lassoed over the bedpost. She pulled his boxers down to his feet. His tongue was in her ear, and they were rolling over, and he was on top of her. He shucked off her underpants. He still had one sock on, and she tossed it across the room.
He kissed her breasts, running his tongue over her nipples. He was hard against her thigh. She touched his scrotum. She went down the length of him and took him in her mouth, but after a minute he stopped her. “I don’t want to come yet.”
She squeezed his leg and he shuddered. Her breath came out in jagged spurts.
They lay together when they were done, their ankles touching.
In the bathroom, she stood behind him while he peed, her hands running through his hair, her chin resting on his shoulder. Back in bed, she wrapped her arms around him, and soon they fell asleep.
* * *
—
She woke up suddenly at four a.m., thinking she heard a cell phone ringing. But no one had called. She had no text messages either.
She got back into bed but she couldn’t sleep. Walter was on his stomach, breathing quietly beside her, the corner of the pillow tucked into his mouth.
She stood at the window and tried to see the road, but it was as dark and desolate as the tundra.
Back in bed, she started to cry.
“Pru, what’s wrong?”
“I want to go home.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Walter—please—take me back to the city.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“Don’t make me take the bus.”
* * *
—
Great Barrington to West 73rd Street. The trip took two hours and twenty minutes, but on an early Saturday morning the Taconic was deserted, and they made it back in two hours. They didn’t even stop for gas. “Coffee?” she said, thinking he was going on little sleep, but he said, “I’m fine.”
When they got off the highway, she started to cry again. They were stopped behind a truck on 72nd Street, and she wiped her face clean.
Walter pulled up to her building.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t deserve this.”
He didn’t contradict her.
She kissed him long and hard, the windshield clouding over from their breath. A tear came off her face and traveled down his nose. The neighbors could see them, but she didn’t care.
She was outside the building fishing for her keys, and when she turned around he was gone.
* * *
—
When she walked into the apartment Ginny said, “What happened, Pru? Why are you back?”
“It was cold up there. I hate the country.”
“Look who’s home, Professor. Your wife came back from her trip.”
But Spence just stared at her distantly, as if he hadn’t realized she’d been gone.
* * *
—
One morning, as Pru was leaving for work, Ginny stopped her in the hallway. “What’s this?” Ginny held up a piece of paper.
Pru’s heart lurched: it was the portrait of her and Walter. How had Ginny found it? “That’s me,” she said calmly. “I got my portrait taken with an old friend.”
They were sitting in the kitchen, and Spence, eating his grapefruit, looked down at the portrait. “That’s Pru’s other husband.”
“What?” Pru said.
“I met him,” he said. “That’s the man you’re going to marry when I’m dead.”
Part VII
34
They were staying in Georgetown, in a short-term rental. Arlo had found them the house, just as he’d gotten his father into the drug trial. He was rich now, and he invested in biotech. Zenithican was the most promising Alzheimer’s drug to come along in years.
A drug trial? Pru had thought. Spence already resisted taking his medicine. Sometimes, when she wasn’t looking, he would spit out his pills, and she would have to start the process over again. Other times, she would find the pills coagulating between his teeth and gums, secreted there like chewing tobacco. Why should she p
ut Spence in a drug trial? So he could have his blood drawn, his vital signs measured, so he could be given injections, like a chicken or a cow? Zenithican was an experimental drug: there was no telling what it might do to him.
Meanwhile, he was getting worse and worse. The other week, she let her attention idle, and he inserted the remains of a red pepper into his mouth: the stem and core, the seeds. As she tried to remove the food from his mouth, he looked up at her, startled, his eyes welling with tears.
He’d bitten her, and she ran her hands under the sink, thinking he had rabies, that he was a dog and had mange. He’d eaten the pepper scraps, unable to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the food from the rot, the garbage. What would happen next? Would he chew on electrical wires? On shoes?
Of course he was getting worse and worse. Did she think he was going to get better and better?
“Darling,” she said, “do you want to take a drug that might help you?”
“Yes.”
“You do?”
“No.”
There were so many questions she should have asked back when she could have asked them. If she believed in this drug—if she believed in any Alzheimer’s drug—she wouldn’t have hesitated: anything to save him. But she didn’t believe she was saving him, and maybe she was doing him harm. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
But he would be no more able to decide tomorrow than he was today.
So she quit her job and moved them down to D.C.
* * *
—
Arlo’s office was in a big glass building, where, from the reception area on the fourteenth floor, Sarah could see the nation’s great edifices: the White House, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court. She was doing her medical residency now, and she’d been given two weeks’ leave. She wanted to be in town at the beginning of the trial so she could guide her parents through the protocol.
She was shocked that Arlo had landed in D.C. He was an entrepreneur, and he hated government. Yet he’d moved there anyway, as if to say, You don’t know me. And she didn’t. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d moved to D.C. just to flummox her. He’d left Silicon Valley, cashed out right before his company’s IPO. If he’d stayed, he would have been obscenely wealthy; this way, he was only very wealthy. He wanted people to know he didn’t care. She thought of Arlo’s maternal grandfather, the kosher butcher, moving the family from outpost to outpost; thought of Arlo’s mother, wanting to poop in all fifty states. And there was Arlo, her brother, the third generation of Zackheims who couldn’t sit still.
It was July, and D.C. was as advertised: hot and damp as the inside of a dog’s mouth. Arlo’s office was long and rectangular, larger than most of the apartments she had lived in, and it was decked out in the spare, unreflective manner of a young MBA. A leather couch. A leather recliner. An enormous flat-screen TV. In the corner stood a fish tank in which tropical fish appeared to be doing laps. There was a lot of metal and glass, and what wood there was had a metallic sheen, so that everywhere she looked her reflection was cast back at her. Nothing sat on the desk save for Arlo’s iPhone. It was as if paper were beneath him: he dealt only in the lofty currency of ideas.
“So the prodigal daughter returns.”
“For two weeks.” Then it was back to her own life. Growing up, Arlo used to compete with her over who was the better child. Now she competed with him over who was the worse one.
“I assume you know about Zenithican.”
She did. The drug was in phase 2, and it was generating excitement. There was a new theory that Alzheimer’s was related to the microbiome—a gut-brain relationship—but that theory was dismissed by most researchers, and whatever drugs arose from it were still years away. Zenithican, on the other hand, was a plaque drug; it was, Sarah believed, their last, best hope.
* * *
—
Pru hadn’t seen Arlo in six years, not since that night at Columbia when Spence was elevated to his new post. Arlo was thirty-three now, but the boyishness hadn’t dissipated, and the skittishness of his face. He stood across from her: Spence’s son, the boy her husband had fathered, the boy her husband had loved, the boy she herself had grown to love. For a moment, she was overcome. “Arlo.” She hugged him.
“Where’s Dad?”
“I’ll take you in.”
But Ginny came out first.
“I’m Arlo,” he said.
Ginny shook his hand. “We’ve been waiting a long time for your visit.”
Arlo understood that. Sarah had called him. Pru had called him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Ginny had called him herself. Come visit, they said. Come see your father while you still can. Every time he said he would come, and every time he didn’t. How could a visit mean anything to his father when his father wouldn’t remember it after he’d gone? But Arlo would remember it, and it sickened him. The chest-beating, the deathbed apologies: he wouldn’t be a part of any of that. Who was Spence Robin to him, his nominal father, the man he’d been delivered to like a care package, a week here, a few days there, a smidge of time during summer vacation before he was returned to his rightful owner, those two years, not even, when he’d been given lodging in their apartment, quartered like a horse? That was no way to treat a son; someone should have called Family Services.
He looked at Ginny, and at Rafe. Why did all these people care about his father? Why did he not care enough? “He was a bad father,” he told Ginny.
“My son probably thinks I’m a bad mother, too.”
“You’re an excellent mother. I’ve heard about you.”
Rafe just stood there, not saying anything, listening to his mother speak about him.
“Let’s go, Rafe,” Ginny said. “The professor’s son has come to visit. We should leave them alone.”
* * *
—
In preparation for his father’s visit, Arlo had looked at horrific photographs—burn victims, children ravaged by starvation, survivors of bombings and war—but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw now, this man who looked twenty-five years older than he was, shriveled as a fig. “Pop.”
His father didn’t respond.
A magazine lay on the table, and Arlo was brought back to when he was a boy, reading to his father from Deadpool vs. X-Force and Kingdom Come, drawing the letters in the air. “How are you, Dad?”
“I’m all right.”
“You’re here for a drug trial, Dad. We’re going to make you better.”
“Thank you,” his father said.
“Zenithican,” Arlo said. “It’s the most promising Alzheimer’s drug to come along in years. I got you into the drug trial, Dad.”
“Thank you,” his father repeated.
Arlo looked at his father. Who cared if he didn’t visit? He would arrest the course of his father’s disease. That was how he’d be a good son.
* * *
—
That night, unable to sleep, Arlo removed the folder from his desk. The words were written in his hand, composed when he was still a teenager, living in his father’s apartment. All together vs. Altogether. Continual isn’t the same as continuous. Learn the difference between infer and imply. Between you and I is wrong, though even Bill Clinton made that mistake. He said, “Give Al Gore and I a chance.” When used as an adjective, it’s blond, not blonde, even for a girl. Forbear vs. forebear, forgo vs. forego. Invaluable is not the opposite of valuable. It’s a stationery box, not a stationary box, though presumably it’s a stationary box, too. Lie vs. lay vs. laid vs. lain. Sleight vs. slight. It’s home in on, not hone in on, like a homing pigeon. Principle vs. principal. The principal is your principal pal. Spell these words correctly: supersede, minuscule, idiosyncrasy. Flout vs. flaunt. Grizzly vs. grisly. Mantel vs. mantle. Desert vs. dessert. It’s anticlimactic, not anticlimatic. Marquis vs. marquee. Discrete v
s. discreet. Aggravate is not the same as irritate. Taught vs. taut. Leech vs. leach. Hark vs. hearken. Whet vs. wet. Peek vs. peak vs. pique. Loan is not a verb. Tic vs. tick. It’s free rein, not free reign, unless you’re the king. Demur vs. demure. It’s duct tape, not duck tape. Already vs. all ready. Bizarre vs. bazaar. An acronym is different from an abbreviation. And never, upon pain of death, use the word impacted, unless you are a dentist.
Even now, reading through the list—perusing it—sent Arlo’s heart lurching. He thought of the things he hadn’t known, and now he knew them. Even when he didn’t know something (did spendthrift mean you spent or you were thrifty?), he reminded himself it didn’t matter. He could spit on the difference between lie and lay. He could use impact as a verb and be no worse for it. He remained a bad speller—he still couldn’t spell minuscule, or idiosyncrasy, or supersede—but he’d earned the right to misspell those words, to mangle the English language with impunity. A lot of good it had done his father, knowing the difference between discreet and discrete. His father, who could never accept his son’s limitations; who would say, Focus and Try harder and Bear down; who had wanted to understand Arlo’s learning disability but hadn’t been able to. What good had his father’s vaunted language skills done him? He was but a shell of himself, and Arlo, meanwhile, had risen and risen.
In the bathroom, taking a pee, Arlo recalled a joke his father had once told about a British person and a French person arguing over whose language was superior. The punch line was that impertinent wasn’t the opposite of pertinent. Arlo hadn’t understood the joke, and he was left with only the memory of it, and the accompanying feeling of embarrassment. He still didn’t understand the pertinent vs. impertinent joke, only now his father couldn’t understand it either. The famous steel trap had become porous. Arlo didn’t want to see what his father had become; he didn’t even want to imagine it. But he did imagine it, and he felt relief.
Morningside Heights Page 22
