by Delia Ephron
I just wave my hand in front of my face. I don’t want to deal with this, not now, I am saying.
“Madge is on her way,” says Kim, “but she wants you to call her in her car. There, it’s fixed.” She zips my skirt closed. “You can use the gift shop phone.”
“Where’s the RSVP list?” I say this with the same urgency with which I might ask whether she happened to see some show on television the night before.
“In my briefcase. In the back, in the offices.”
“Would you get it, please?”
“I’d better finish filling these bags first.”
“Kim, I want that list.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“Just get me the list. Now.”
“Sure, fine.”
“And ask Leon for a tablecloth. This table is the first thing people see when they arrive, and it looks terrible.”
“Ms. Mozell?”
I swing around.
“John Gerity.” He offers to shake hands the way a toy soldier might, arm crooked at the elbow, hand rigid.
This man is lean, brisk, and crisp. He wastes neither words nor expression. His mouth returns to rest position immediately after speaking. His clothes are spiffy. Undoubtedly he does not wrinkle his khaki pants even when he sits.
“I hear your mariachi band is wonderful,” I say.
I am rewarded with a grim smile, which disappears almost before I see it. “I am the Citrus Singers.”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry. I’ll be right with you.” He follows me to the gift shop.
“Hello, Madge.”
“Eve, dear.” I can hear freeway sounds in the background.
“Is anything wrong?”
“I didn’t sleep all night.”
“Me neither,” I say, thinking of how I wandered around dark L.A. streets, calling, “Buddha, Buddha.” Then lay in bed too wiped out to read, too wired to sleep, until I finally yanked the phone cords.
“These parties are so agitating, aren’t they? Do you think we made a mistake not having name tags?”
“No, I don’t.”
“But name tags are such a comfort. Then there’s never a moment when you can’t remember a name.”
“That would be an amazing experience, but it’s too late to do anything now.”
“I have tags in the car.”
“Madge, please.”
“I know. Forget I said it. I’m such a worrywart. How’s your father?”
“He’s … dying.”
Gerity looks over from the bookshelf where he’s pretending to browse. “We don’t know when,” I add, then hear myself say brightly, “Death has its own timetable.”
“That is so profound,” says Madge. “I have to remember that. When my father died, I thought, ‘Well, Madge Turner, you’re an orphan now.’”
“How old were you?”
“Fifty-two. The terrible part is this. Once your parents die”—she lowers her voice to a whisper, although she is all alone in her car—“there’s nothing between you and death.” Regular voice again: “Is your mother alive?”
I don’t hesitate. “Not really.”
Madge doesn’t notice anything ironic. “Then you’re going to be an orphan too.”
“I guess so. I’d better get off. I have to deal with the Citrus Singers.”
“All right, dear. I’ll see you soon. I’m only a few avocado trees away.”
I hang up. “Kim told me you’re upset,” I say to Gerity. “What’s the problem?”
“I’ll show you.”
As we walk through the museum, we are joined by an employee named Victoria, wearing a Republican-blue blazer. “I’m here to help, just ask me,” she declares. We pass fruit and vegetable receipts from the Nixon family store, Nixon’s public speaking medal from college, the station wagon he drove when he ran for Congress. Every campaign button, every aspect of his life is documented. On television sets from various decades, Nixon is giving the speeches he gave then. “Do you think Julie and Tricia like this?” I ask.
“Certainly,” says Gerity.
“Who wouldn’t,” says Victoria. “Here their daddy lives forever.”
We stop at the Living Legends Room, where there are statues of de Gaulle, Golda Meir, Chou En-lai. There is a sign that tells us to press a legend and hear what President Nixon thought. Gerity puts his hand on a picture of de Gaulle. We hear Nixon’s voice.
“I would say he is almost gentle.”
And what memorable words will I remember? “Your sister’s a bitch. I’m her father, I can say it.”
“You see the problem.” Gerity’s lips purse in, then pucker out, as if he were using them to push off from one end of a swimming pool to the other. “You see the problem,” he repeats.
I do.
“If someone presses a button and Nixon speaks, it will interfere with our singing and clogging.”
“We have a bullet at least. That’s not a lot, but it’s something,” I say.
“Are you referring to the World War Two Colt forty-five revolver and six silver bullets that Elvis Presley gave the President?” asks Victoria.
“Yes,” I lie.
She smiles. “Good, because right in front is a perfect place to sing and clog.”
We are heading toward the Colt when Kim runs up with the RSVP list. “We’re moving the Citrus Singers across from the revolver,” I tell her. I start flipping the pages, scanning the list. H, I, J, K. Kalawitz, Keefe, Kerlin.
Victoria’s beeper goes off. She listens to her walkie-talkie. “You have another call,” she says.
“Oh God, he’s dead.”
“Yes,” she says sadly. “He’s buried in the back with Pat.”
I pick up a wall phone. “Hello?”
There’s static. Then a man says, “Well, what the hell, did Mitchell know to any degree what was going on?”
“Mitchell? Who’s this?”
Victoria takes the receiver from my hand. “That’s not a real phone. That phone plays the President’s smoking-gun call with Haldeman. Throwing these events makes me scrambled too.”
Old telephone calls, perfectly preserved? This is a museum of horrors.
As I take her portable phone, I keep reading the RSVP list. Klein, Kolter, Kraven. It helps if I concentrate on the list while I answer the phone. It keeps me from worrying about what’s waiting for me on the other end. “Hello?”
“It’s Madge again.”
“Aren’t you here yet?”
“My, yes, I’m in the atrium. I didn’t want to walk all the way over to you, so I phoned.”
Krupp, Kubalik, and then I find his name. I find what I am hoping for. “Madge?”
“Yes, dear.”
“I think we do want name tags.”
I see Kim looking at me. Her mouth falls open. She fans herself with her hand. “We don’t have time, we can’t possibly—”
“How marvelous,” says Madge. “I’ll snatch them right out of my trunk.”
I start back to the atrium. “I’ll help you fill them out,” I say.
“There’s no way we can do hundreds of—” Kim is chasing after me.
I whirl around. “We’ll all help.” A stop sign. Unlike Jesse, she observes it.
Two hours later the name tags are done, and the first doctors are drifting in and over to the table where Kim and Victoria sit with the tags and checklist. Having freshened up using all my beauty supplies, I hover around behind, straining to catch the names, but then John Gerity demands that the Citrus Singers be served dinner and Leon rushes up to protest that there is not enough food. Besides coping with this, I notice that the doctors are now coming in hordes, too many, too fast to keep track of.
Perhaps Omar is fat. Perhaps he is three feet tall and has to stand on a chair to work his lasers.
I have to get a look at the checklist. I have to see if he has slipped by. “You need a break,” I tell Kim.
But her gaze drifts. Off my face and over my shoulder. A dreamy loo
k washes over her and her lips part, almost involuntarily. I turn.
“I must give you my name,” he says.
I elbow Kim out of the way—almost knock her off her chair actually—grab a pencil and hold it poised, preparing to check off the name I already know. I can hear my own heart beat. I can hear it so loud it might be coming out of stereo speakers. Can he hear it too? Is every ear, nose, and throat doctor going to start marching around the Nixon Library to the beat of my deranged heart? “Yes, please, what is it?”
And now that he has heard my voice, he knows me too. Now he will say “Eve,” in that velvety way.
“I am Dr. Kunundar. Omar.”
Okay, he didn’t know me, but he didn’t know I was going to be here. I scan the list pretending I don’t know he’s on it.
I hand over his name tag and he smiles. The temperature rises thirty degrees.
Did I say what he looks like?
He has the exact height required for nonchalant elegance. His skin is a smooth, mellow coffee-cream, his hair thick and raven black. I won’t get into his cheekbones or the decisiveness of his jaw, but his deep brown eyes have black pools suitable for drowning in. And he has the dashing mustache of a gambler who carries only silver dollars for change and plays for very high stakes. But he is not a gambler, he is a thief. He is the highwayman who comes riding, riding, riding. And I am at the old inn door.
He is even alone. How is this possible?
“Kim, would you take over?” I say this as if I have worked for hours.
I follow him at a distance. A discreet distance, at least at first.
“He’s going to order vodka, straight up,” I tell myself as he goes to the bar. One with a name—Absolut, or that other one. “Tomato juice,” he says. I move up next to him.
I see the Citrus Singers start dancing to “California, Here I Come.” If Joe were here, he would be plying them with questions. What attracted you to clogging? Is it your family sport? Do wooden shoes hurt your toes? If you live in an apartment, does the clogging bug your neighbors?
“May I get you something?”
“Excuse me?” He actually spoke to me and I didn’t hear.
“May I get you something?”
“I am Eve Mozell. The woman whose son hit you.”
“No!” It is the astonishment of my dreams.
“I organized this. This is what I do for a living.”
“It is fate,” he says solemnly.
“I am married.”
I blurt this and want to die, but he laughs. “Then it is my tragedy. But you must talk to me.”
He looks around, but there is nowhere to sit. The couches in front of the TV showing the Nixon-Kennedy debates are filled. He takes my arm. “Wait, what may I get you?”
“White wine.”
“Of course.” He says this as if white wine suits me and only me. As if he has learned something deeply telling. The bartender hands it to him; he presents it to me. Then he steers me down the hall. Moves me expertly through the crowd. His competence overwhelms. I begin to envy his patients. I begin to wish for nose surgery.
“Here.” He stops at the “Ask the President” room. We go in, past the computers with buttons for selecting questions, to the rows of seats in front of a big screen where Nixon’s videotaped answers appear. This high-tech place is not where we should be, of course. We should be outside near a weeping willow tree under a full moon. I doubt there is a weeping willow in Yorba Linda, although there is surely a moon. Even Yorba Linda gets to have the moon.
Dr. Omar Kunundar pilots me to two seats at the end of the front row, as private a location as possible, and waits until I sit before he does. He fastens his brown eyes on me. “How are you?” It is the most meaningful question I have ever been asked.
“I’m very sad.” It is a relief to say and a relief to feel for the first time that I am in no danger from this feeling. It will not wash me out to sea.
He nods understandingly. “You love your father very much.”
“No, I don’t. How could I? How could I possibly?”
“That is a very deep question,” says Omar.
We contemplate it.
Finally he sighs, a sigh that implies a thorough search with tragic consequences.
“What?” I ask.
“You think love is something healthy. That is the problem.”
“Well, of course, isn’t it?”
“You think how you love your husband or your son, that is love. This other thing, what could it be? How could you love this—”
“Nutcase?”
“A very good word. I will never forget it.”
“This selfish nutcase,” I say fiercely.
“Yes, this selfish nutcase. The uproar man.”
“Uproar?”
Omar smiles, and his eyes crinkle with kindness. These little lines of care evince hours spent at the bedsides of patients, explaining their X rays, their blocked sinuses, their deviated septums. “This is why I leave Persia,” he says. “The Ayatollah loves uproar. Everyone must be upset all the time. He eats this. It is his bacon with eggs. Your father has a bad case of uproar, but not as bad as the Ayatollah.”
“Nixon loved uproar too.”
“Then how perfect that we are here.” He raises his glass of tomato juice. “To your sadness.”
“To my sadness.” We clink. We celebrate my grief. We toast it as if it were an achievement.
Omar does not take his eyes off me, even while we drink.
“How is your father now?”
“He was back in the Home, but now he’s in Tomorrowland.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s been moved to a hospital, on a floor with all old people. I spoke to the doctor this morning. He said my father’s kidneys are failing and he’s not conscious. I just called it Tomorrowland because it’s where we’ll all end up … if we’re lucky.”
“I do not understand.”
“I mean, if we live a long time, we get to die there.”
“Yes,” says Omar, “it is a queer reward. When I was a resident, I worked on a floor like the one that has your father, and every day I made an imagination that I was visiting an ancient civilization. All these—” He lifts his hands helplessly, the word has escaped him.
“Relics?” I say.
“How did you see that is what I don’t know?”
I shrug modestly.
“Relics.” His tongue rolls the r over and beds it. “Living relics.” He seduces the r again and continues on as if the conquest is meaningless. “They are concealing secrets and knowledge, that is what I think. What can your father tell you?”
“His regrets.” I laugh, and Omar looks at me curiously. “I’m sorry. His life must be one big regret—all those hospitalizations for drinking or craziness, barely a thought in his head that didn’t pop out of it. You know, when I think about death I often say something obvious. Regrets, that’s so conventional. I want him to have regrets, that’s what I want.”
“You want him to be sorry for his cruelty,” Omar says without judgment.
“No, not really. If he were sorry it would be too much feeling poured in my direction. He was more like a flood than a father.”
“You must think hard. What do you want?”
We sit in companionable silence.
“Something so I’m not afraid of death,” I offer.
“Ah, you want wisdom and comfort.”
“What I never had in life.”
“Yes, it is hard to have that from a ‘nutcase.’” He laughs at the word. “But it is not the end yet. Maybe you will be surprised.”
“I hope not.” I say this so sincerely that he is startled.
“Eve.” He taps my nose. “I think it is the opposite of death that you are scared of.”
This causes me to feel peculiar. What he says. His sweetness. The tap on my nose that seems to be lingering even though his hand is back in his lap.
I look at the screen, where the question now reads
, “You met Elvis Presley. How would you describe him?” And Nixon, preserved on tape looking hale and hearty when he is in fact buried in the back with Pat, answers, “Some say, because he used drugs, he could not be an example to young people, but they overlook the fact that he never used illegal drugs, only drugs prescribed by his physician.”
Joe would love this room, I think. All these questions with their nutty answers. It would put him away.
I spring up. “I think I’d better make sure everything’s going all right.”
“I am sorry to hear that.” Omar smiles again, and I feel dizzy. I grip the back of the seat for balance.
“I’m here for work.”
He gets up. “Yes, I too have business. I suppose I must scatter.”
“You mean mix.”
“Yes, mix.”
I put out my hand. “It was so nice to meet you. And your mother is a wonderful person. Say hello to her for me.” We shake but he does not let go.
“You are a warm person,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“Why do I think this warmth is something you got from your father?” He kisses my hand. “Good-bye, Eve.”
And he disappears. If there had been a mist, it would have enveloped him, but instead he is swallowed up by a bunch of clog dancers who are taking their dinner break.
“Well?” Kim demands as we wait for Leon to stow the last of his cooking equipment in his truck.
“It was a success.”
“Not the party, that’s not what I mean. The doctor you were talking to. Who was he? What did he want?”
“I think he was here only for me. Someone sent him.” I don’t wait for her to ask “Who?” since I have no answer. “Thanks, Kim, you were great, as usual. Thanks for everything. I’ll see you Monday.”
“But Eve—”
“Bye, Kim.” I run to my car. “Thanks again,” I cry, but a wind has come up and it blows the words back at me. I can tell this because Kim starts toward her car and doesn’t look back. No one can hear me. I am alone in a parking lot in Yorba Linda. I am tempted to shout, “Omar.” I will shout his name and let the wind carry it to the stars, where it belongs. “Omar,” I venture quietly.
When I pull into the driveway, all the lights in the house are on. “Eve, is that you?” Joe calls from the bedroom window, then throws open the front door. “Eve.”
