Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  “But can’t you hang on okay now? The monthly fee for this floor is down to sixty-eight dollars each, isn’t it?”

  “How long do you think that will last? Those are legal contracts.”

  “But if everybody sticks together?”

  “It may come down some. Not enough to matter. I wish I could just walk away. But Nance and I are on the notes, and we’d lose our house along with the apartments.”

  “And there’s the little problem with Mrs. Neale.”

  “That wasn’t too bright, that letter you didn’t answer.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s bright, friend. You tend the law and I’ll sell your rotten apartments.”

  “Don’t get sore. Okay? I didn’t mean anything. Just that maybe she has an outside chance of voiding the contract.”

  “On account of her fool letter. Right?”

  “Please, let’s not fuss about it. It isn’t only the apartments. We had a meeting of the partners, and there’s going to be less to cut up this year. A lot less. I can’t seem to get it across to you that I’m really in bad shape. I’m really worried, Loretta honey.”

  “Then Loretta is going to take your mind off your problems.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What is it beginning to look like?”

  “I’ve got to be getting back to …”

  “Hush, dear. Please hush.”

  It took longer than she expected to get a response from him, and when the response was adequate, she daintily knee-walked sideways, until with her last step she lifted one knee across his head and then settled delicately. In about ten minutes Loretta knew that Greg could come again and she could not, and as she began hastening him, she heard a small sound near the open doorway. She glanced sidelong and saw a young woman in a yellow sun dress standing in the doorway. She had a plump, pretty, childlike face and dark hair. She wore a strange expression.

  She said in an apologetic voice, “I just came to get … to get …”

  Gregory roughly and abruptly pushed forward and down on Loretta’s hips, collapsing her against his chest. He raised his head until, over the round hillock of a buttock, he could see his wife standing in the doorway.

  “Please!” he roared, tumbling Loretta off him. “Please!”

  It seemed to him then, and later, a strange entreaty. Please what? Understand? Forgive? Forget?

  But Nancy was gone. The corridor door slammed. Gregory bounded up and ran to the door and almost opened it before he realized very little would be achieved through naked pursuit.

  When he returned to the bedroom, Loretta was kneeling on the bed, sitting back on her heels, combing her hair back with spread fingers. She wore an expression of sweet concern. “Aw, sweetie, that’s too bad. That really is.”

  He smacked his bare thigh with his fist, so hard that he winced and rubbed the spot. “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned.

  “Well, she shouldn’t have been sneaking around.”

  “She wasn’t! She probably came over here to get something she bought when we furnished the apartments. Probably something we need.”

  “Whatever she was doing, she shouldn’t have been here.”

  “You didn’t fasten the chain on the door!”

  “Greg, dear. I got here first. Remember? Whoever gets here last is supposed to fasten it.”

  “That lousy chain. Two seconds it would have taken. Jesus, all my luck has turned bad.”

  “That’s not exactly flattering, dear.”

  “Well. You know what I mean. What am I going to do?”

  “Have you considered the Foreign Legion?”

  “This is no time for cheap jokes, damn you!”

  She came swarming off the bed and slapped him hard before he could evade the blow. “Watch your mouth, you silly little prick!”

  “I just think … making jokes isn’t going to help.”

  “Face it. There isn’t anything that’s going to help. If she ever did take you back, which isn’t likely, she would make you crawl on your belly all the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”

  “I just want to explain to her that …”

  “Explain! What is there to explain, and how would you explain it? We were quite obviously doing exactly what we were doing. About the only constructive thing you can do is come back here and stretch out again.”

  “You must be out of your mind, Loretta.”

  “Trust Loretta. Come on, sweetie. Come to Loretta.”

  “No. I can’t, not now.”

  “Listen very carefully. You come here right now, or there isn’t going to be any next time, ever. Either come here, or put your clothes on and get the hell out. That is what is known as an ultimatum.”

  He stared at her with a look of thoughtful stupidity. All the hours at a desk had begun to give him a pouchy look, and there was a small roll around his middle. He was not as heavily hung as Cole Kimber, she thought. But he was nice.

  He sighed audibly and went to the chest at the foot of the bed and took his jockey shorts and stepped into them. He lost his balance and hopped on his left leg a couple of times before regaining it.

  “Did you hear what I told you?” she said.

  He snapped the elastic waistband. “I heard you.”

  “I mean it, you know.”

  “I guess you probably mean it.”

  He sat on the chest and pulled his socks on. He stepped into his pants, tied his shoes, put on the white guayabera—approved for the summer months at the office.

  She watched him, lips tightly compressed. He went into the bathroom and she heard the water running. He came out, still combing his hair with his fingertips.

  He stared at her morosely. “Well … you take it easy, Loretta. It’s been … I guess it’s been a lot of fun. I don’t know. It’s been a lot of something.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Sure,” he said, and left.

  She sprawled on her face on the beach towel and wept. She drifted from infrequent sobs into sleep, and when she woke up she was astonished to discover it was after four. She tied her hair out of the way and showered. She brushed her teeth with kitchen salt and a corner of a towel. After she was dressed and had brushed her hair to smoothness, she smiled at herself in the mirror, showing her teeth. She let the smile fade and she studied herself carefully, thinking that it was better without the glasses than with them. Myopia blurred all the tiny wrinkles. They became visible when she moved close to the mirror. She pressed her thumbs against the sides of her face close to the ears and pushed upward. The little puffy places at the corners of her mouth disappeared. The skin under her eyes tightened. The pouch under her chin was gone. Her eyes had an interesting tilt.

  Back to the olden days, she thought. P.M. Pre-menopause. Take twenty-five hundred out of capital and get it done. When? Well, right now. Soon as it can be scheduled. Slack time. Summer time. Recession time.

  But Greg is going to come crawling back. From the look on her face, the marriage is absolutely stone dead. Hell, he projects a very masculine image, but on the inside he is a weak, scared little man. With no one to hold him and comfort him but me, he’ll come back. I won’t let him come back too quickly and easily. The little nips and tucks and stitches can wait until I’ve let him come back, and gotten him finally all trained and housebroken, and then I can get the repairs done, knowing he won’t wander while I’m out of circulation. It really comes down to this … he has nowhere else he can go.

  Jud and Fred Brasser were both prematurely balding men in their early thirties, both too heavy, both florid and authoritative. Jud was a Santa Monica banker, and Fred was a Fort Worth broker.

  Dr. Vidal was a sallow young man with metal-rimmed glasses and an oversized black mustache. He wore a white smock. The Brasser brothers had cornered him in a small waiting room at the end of a third-floor corridor of the Athens Memorial Hospital. Dr. Vidal sat on the shiny plastic cushions of the couch. The brothers had hitched their chairs forward, blocking escape.

  �
��You wouldn’t believe that apartment,” Jud said. “We had two maids in there cleaning yesterday. They cleaned that place for seven hours. I took down eight of those big plastic bags full of trash. I don’t know how come my mother was living like that. My wife, Marie, came here last year in August to look after Mom when she was getting out of the hospital after that jaundice, and the apartment was okay then—”

  “As I was saying,” Vidal interrupted, “we know very little as yet about the mental effects of severe cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “She’s a carefree person,” the broker said, “but not what you’d call sloppy. Not that–sloppy.”

  “The needle biopsy we took last year showed typical advanced cirrhosis. Now let me try in layman’s terms to give you some indication of what we expect from liver damage. The body’s use of protein is impaired so that there is a wasting away of muscle tissue, so that one gets the pipestem arms and legs typical of the advanced case. Also one can expect edema, an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the face, giving the typical lumpy look of the alcoholic—”

  “Now wait just a …”

  Vidal held up a hand. “Please. Ask your questions when I am finished. As the liver becomes hardened by the accumulation of connective tissue, one sees a kind of back pressure exerted on the venous system, causing varicosities in the places normally expected, but also on the inner wall of the esophagus. At the same time, the liver’s function in producing one of the blood-clotting agents ceases, and the blood becomes so thin it can leak through the walls of the varicosed veins in the esophagus, and from there into the stomach. That is why we check alcohol-abuse patients for black stool which would indicate internal bleeding.

  “I attempted to tell your mother the seriousness of her situation when she was hospitalized last August. But I could not believe I was reaching her. Let me explain why. The liver is a very complex organ. It does a great many things. In addition to what I have told you, it also regulates the balance of certain key compounds in the bloodstream. It controls the sodium and magnesium and potassium balance. Though the research still has a long way to go, we do know that these substances in proper balance are necessary for adequate brain function. For example, were one to completely upset the sodium balance, the patient would become almost instantaneously unconscious. In fact, that is precisely how one of the spectrum of anesthetics works. It is fair to assume, I think, that when the balance of these substances is altered, brain function is also altered. One could say that the person is semi-anesthetized, and I do not mean that this is the effect of alcohol directly, when there is a semiparalysis of the cerebral cortex. I am saying that after severe liver damage, even were a person to cease all alcohol intake for several weeks, the fuzziness of the brain function would persist. Yet, after several months of abstinence, if as much as one tenth of the liver were left undamaged, one could expect a very gradual recovery of function. Though the damaged areas cannot regenerate, the undamaged areas can take on a larger share of the total functions than one might expect. At any rate, she could not comprehend or accept the seriousness of my warning. Quite obviously she kept on drinking and, as was her habit, did not eat while or after drinking, so that the liver damage was accelerated. The … squalid condition of the apartment was due to the semi-anesthetic effect I have described to you. The electrical impulses in the brain deteriorate. Conversation becomes endlessly repetitive, anecdotal, simplified. They think you are making jokes of some sort.

  “She was on the verge of complete liver failure when she was brought in. It was fortunate that she could keep her wits about her enough to call an ambulance.”

  “It looked more like she was hemorrhaging to death,” the banker said. “She threw up in a wastebasket near the bed, and there was so much …” He turned slightly gray.

  “Less blood than it would look like, actually,” Dr. Vidal said. “The thinned blood drained into the stomach and combined with stomach acids to form those large clots you described to me.”

  “What are you doing for her now, in Intensive Care?” the broker asked.

  “A small balloon has been inserted into the esophagus and inflated. This collapses the leaking veins against the wall of the esophagus and encourages clotting and stops the bleeding. She has had transfusions and we have given her clotting agents, and we have tapped the abdominal cavity and drained almost two liters of fluid accumulation. The balloon stopped the bleeding yesterday, but it began again in the night.”

  Jud, the banker, said, “Doctor, what can be done for her?”

  “Lay it all out,” Fred, the broker, said.

  The doctor took his glasses off, sighed, held them to the light, huffed on them, began cleaning them with tissue. “We get quite a few of these cases, people in their fifties. They have had years and years of social drinking, and then it has turned into something else. And finally after ten years of hard drinking, the liver begins to quit. It is difficult for me to separate professional imperatives from moral judgments.”

  “I think you’d better explain that,” said Jud, the banker.

  “I hope to try, if you’ll let me. If we can’t stop the bleeding, the next step would be a procedure called a portal shunt. It means rerouting the whole blood supply system to and from the liver. It is a major operation. It is a very messy operation, because the thinned blood makes a bad field to work in. It takes four or five hours, and a lot of transfusions. If it succeeds, then the patient has another three weeks before going home. Postoperative patients after this particular operation are bad news on the floor. They seldom regain full mental acuity. They are quarrelsome, primitive, demanding and messy. That is not a judgment. That is a fact. If they recover and go home, most of them die within the year of liver failure.”

  “Why? How come?”

  “For the liver to be so bad that a portal shunt is required, it is generally so far gone that the renewed blood supply is not going to hold it steady. Besides, most of them seem to find their way to alcohol as soon as they get strong enough.”

  Fred said, “You’re telling us Mom is dead.”

  “My professional judgment is that whether or not we stop the bleeding, she will die within the year of liver failure.”

  “Which … which would be easiest for her? Easiest on her?”

  “I would think if we could stop the bleeding it would be best all around.”

  “Do they transplant livers?” the banker asked.

  “Not yet,” said Doctor Vidal. “At least not at her age in her condition.”

  After the doctor was gone, the brothers walked down to the parking lot, moving slowly. When they passed a tall metal light standard, Jud Brasser, the banker, stopped and put an arm around it and leaned his forehead against the painted steel. “Oh, Momma,” he said in a gravely voice. “Oh, Momma, Jesus, Momma.”

  Fred Brasser put his hand on Jud’s shoulder and patted him. “Come on, kid. Come on.”

  Jud slapped the metal pole, making it ring. He straightened and pulled out a handkerchief and honked into it. He glowered at Fred, his eyes still brimming, and said, “Don’t you hate those little fucks? Those little white-coat fucks with the equipment hanging around their necks? They don’t give a shit about anybody.”

  “I guess this one is pretty much okay, kid. He leveled with us, at least.”

  “She wasn’t an alcoholic. I mean she isn’t!”

  “Not the least damn bit when we were growing up. Neither of them were. You know that. Dad liked a few knocks, and he had to do some drinking with the customers in his line of work. And they entertained a lot and went out a lot. Hell, they got high, but not drunk. You know. Drunk people belt each other around.”

  Jud sighed. “You’re talking too much to keep from saying what is going to have to be said, sooner or later. Let’s get out of the sun.”

  At the counter in an icy coffee shop in midafternoon, Jud said, looking down at his coffee, “I don’t have to remind you how we felt when the old man all of a sudden died from that clot, how all four of us
felt, you and Ginny and me and Marie, thinking she would probably be stone broke from the way they always lived, and we were sparring around to see who was going to take her in first.”

  “But it was—”

  “Shut up, big brother. Let’s stop the shit, just this one time. So we all gathered up there at the funeral of Newcomb Carlyle Brasser, wives and kids and all, and afterward, when she wanted the advice of her two big-shot sons, we found out, lo and behold, not only did she have a nice little package of utilities stocks, plus the old man’s Social Security, but they also had the apartment down here. Now you know exactly what she wanted, Freddy. So did I. She said she wanted to get rid of the big house and move down here where she and Dad had wanted to retire, except he didn’t make it. We both knew she wanted to come out and live with us half the year in Santa Monica and with you the other half in Fort Worth. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, hell! Why would Mom want to come down here where she didn’t know anybody?”

  “She never had trouble making friends.”

  “That’s what we told ourselves, Freddy, that she would get along just fine and dandy down here. We said that she ought to do just like all the other old people, go to one of these retirement heavens on earth. We sat there with our sad egg-sucking smiles, and we told that lonesome woman we didn’t want her in our lives. We practically told her that her life was over and it was our turn to have our lives, and she would crap up our privacy and our home life and our kids and our entertaining and our vacations and everything else if we had the burden of that old woman!”

  “Now, God damn it …”

  “Shut up.” He tapped his fist lightly on the countertop. “We did it. We made the decision. We can’t go back now and make a different one. I just think we ought to split this burden of guilt half and half. Hell, we talked to enough of those people in that Golden Sands to know what they thought of her. Peggy Brasser, the drunk. Get out of the road, here comes Peggy Brasser. Some kind of friends she made, hah? You want Peggy, look for her at the Sand Dollar Bar.”