by Brian Morton
He felt like a cartoon character, with a little angel perched on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.
Talk to her first. Talk, then kiss. Tell her about your disappointment that your show didn’t lead to anything. Tell her that you’re a tiny bit envious of her success. Tell her that you hope she has the success you never had.
“Have you ever felt that life is just . . . what am I talking about? I can’t ask you if you’ve ever felt the way a forty-something-year-old man feels.”
“Of course you can,” she said. “Don’t be silly. We all feel the same things.”
We all feel the same things. She said it herself. She wants me to kiss her.
No she doesn’t. She’s too innocent to be thinking that at all.
“Did you ever think you took a wrong turn somewhere, and you can’t go back?” He wasn’t sure what he was talking about, except that he was mad at himself for having given so many of his years to the worship of Nora.
“That’s a terrible way to think,” Renee said. “I don’t believe it. No matter how many wrong turns you make, you can always go in a new direction. As long as you’re alive.”
“Maybe it finally gets too late.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said. “If I believed that, I wouldn’t want to keep living. And I do want to keep living. Passionately.”
Passionately. You can enter another universe, just by leaning forward. You move from one moral universe into another, just like that.
I can’t kiss her. I can’t do it. I shouldn’t do it.
You need to have a little wildness in you, which is the one thing I don’t have.
To hell with Nora. She was wrong about him. He’d prove she was wrong.
Renee was sitting next to him, and there was an invitation in her eyes, he was sure of it, and he leaned forward and kissed her.
As soon as he kissed her, as drunk as he was, he could tell that this wasn’t what she’d wanted. She was returning his kiss, but he could tell that she didn’t want to.
She was kissing him to be polite.
They brought their lips apart and he opened his eyes and she was looking at him with . . . he didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t happiness, so to blot out the sight of it he kissed her again. He pulled her toward him; he had never realized how delicate she was. Birdlike bones. Her mouth was communicating nothing now. Deadness.
Having started, he didn’t know how to stop. He had made the mistake, and now he couldn’t take it back; all he could do was keep kissing her, in the hope that some combination of kisses would unlock her desire.
Somehow he was pinning her against the back of the couch. He hadn’t meant to; it wasn’t passion, it was more like a drunken lurch. He remembered Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino in Sea of Love, the way they’d hurled each other against walls, that’s how hot for each other they were. This did not resemble that.
She put her hand on his chest. He had known her for almost a year, had noticed many times the expressiveness of her hands, and now she was resting one hand familiarly on his chest. “Excuse me,” she said. She went to the bathroom.
He leaned back on the couch. What’s going on here? He wondered if she was putting her diaphragm in. Jesus. His head was spinning. He looked at her CD rack. Bands he’d never heard of. The Palace Brothers. Death Cab for Cutie. Modest Mouse. What am I doing here?
He picked up a book from the end table. Marguerite Duras. For someone who was so politically committed, Renee had unusually avant-garde tastes in literature. He wished there were something easier to read—Entertainment Weekly or something. But she wouldn’t have Entertainment Weekly. She was too serious for that. He opened the book, read a few sentences, couldn’t follow. Looked at the title. The Malady of Death. What the hell did that mean? Death is a bit more than a malady, I should think. He was proud of himself for mentally employing formulations such as “I should think” when he was drunk and waiting for his twenty-one-year-old lover to come out of the bathroom.
Lover? The word didn’t fit. Renee was his spiritual daughter, his protected one, his dear one—what was he thinking? He needed to tell her this was all wrong.
He sat there with a growing headache, looking through Marguerite Duras.
Five pages passed, and then ten. He kept waiting to hear water running in the bathroom, but he couldn’t hear anything.
He thought of asking her if she was all right, but he didn’t want to be intrusive. Maybe she had a stomach virus.
Finally he went up to the bathroom door.
“Renee?”
No answer.
He knocked on the door.
No answer.
He tried the knob. The door was locked.
There was a rustling sound; a piece of paper was emerging from beneath the door. It was a page of a book. The Cultural Turn, by Fredric Jameson. At the top of the page, in Renee’s tiny, splintery handwriting, were the words “PLEASE GO HOME.”
He felt stupid. He didn’t know what to say.
He stood there for another minute. For lack of anything better to do, he read a sentence from the book. “This grand moment of Theory (which some claim now also to have ended) in fact confirmed Hegel’s premonitions by taking as its central theme the dynamics of representation itself: one cannot imagine a classical Hegelian supersession of art by philosophy otherwise than by just such a return of consciousness (and self-consciousness) back on the figuration and the figural dynamics that constitute the aesthetic, in order to dissolve those into the broad daylight and transparency of praxis itself.”
What the fuck?
He heard the sound of a page being torn, and then another page made its way under the door.
On this one, Renee had simply written “PLEASE.”
He thought that maybe he would stand there all night, and she could keep passing him notes telling him to go away, and he would read the notes, and then he would read the page of Fredric Jameson, and in the morning he would be able to discuss postmodernism.
That probably wasn’t the best idea.
“Sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he’d said it loud enough for her to hear. He thought of writing her a note—two could play the old mark-up-Fredric-Jameson game. But then he thought he should just leave. “I’m sorry, Renee,” he said, louder, but she didn’t say anything back.
He went outside and got on his bicycle and set off toward home. He’d humiliated himself, and he’d humiliated her too. He was sure she would have liked to think of herself as someone who could have handled a situation like that with more poise. He’d forced her to reveal a side of herself that was just a scared kid.
Or maybe he’d only humiliated himself.
He was sailing through the cool night streets. The front wheel of his bicycle seemed a little off-kilter. He thought he should get off the bike and check the wheel to see if it needed air. Just give it a squeeze. You could probably tell if it needed air just by tapping it with your foot. He was going down a slight incline; he took his left foot off the pedal and gave the tire a slight tap, and only as he was doing this did it occur to him that this would make the bicycle twist out from under him. He was riding his bike, and then his bike was riding him, and then he was lying in the road, and something had happened to his face.
He managed to make it over to the sidewalk, dragging the bike. His face was reverberating. It hurt so much that he couldn’t tell which parts of it he’d hurt.
There was blood all over the sidewalk. His nose was bleeding; his mouth was bleeding. He hoped he hadn’t lost any teeth.
Isaac’s grandmother, who had died many years ago, had suffered terribly from her ill-fitting dentures, and once, when he was eight or nine, she had solemnly, even desperately, told him to take good care of his teeth. That was the only piece of advice she’d ever given him, or the only one he remembered. Drunk, stunned, splayed out on the sidewalk, Isaac reflected remorsefully that he’d let his poor grandmother down.
He examined his bicycle. It seemed to be in one
piece. He needed to get to an emergency room. No—that wasn’t a good idea. They’d arrest him for drunk driving.
It took him a moment to reason this out and to realize that you don’t get arrested for drunkenly driving a bicycle.
He picked up his bicycle—it still worked—and wobbled toward home. He could go to the hospital tomorrow. He didn’t care that he was in pain, or that he might have messed up his face. What he cared about was that he’d messed things up with Renee.
With another young woman, the mistake might not mean much. It might mean everything with Renee. He knew that he occupied some paternal place in her mind. He’d always known it, but that hadn’t prevented him from fucking things up. She’d looked up to him, she’d trusted him—much more than he deserved.
She was a funny combination of moralism and vulnerability—maybe not such an unusual combination, actually—and he could easily imagine her deciding never to see him again.
When he was a kid there was a damp little boy down the block named Ross, who, whenever he made an error on the baseball field, would start pleading for a do-over. Isaac used to have contempt for him: he didn’t believe in do-overs. But he wished with all his heart that he could ask for a do-over now.
If he could erase the last hour, then the thirty years ahead would be different for both him and Renee. The next thirty years could become again what they were always supposed to be: a time in which they would cultivate a trusting, lasting friendship. That was impossible now.
It was amazing, the way thirty years can be irrevocably altered by one bonehead move.
39
NORA WENT OUT TO RIVERSIDE every evening. Billie was rarely strong enough to talk for more than a few minutes. With the strength she had, she’d tell Nora what she’d dreamed the night before. One night she dreamed that Fiorello LaGuardia was the mayor again and that he was building beautiful homes for the poor. Another night she dreamed that the whole city had become a park, with no cars, no factories, just land for everyone to picnic in. Her dreams were getting larger as she herself was dwindling away.
Listening to one of Billie’s dreams one day, Nora thought that maybe the point of life was to send one dream into the mind of the universe. Everything else in your life is incidental to the dreaming of that dream, but you can’t know which one it is.
Billie’s skin lesions had grotesquely blossomed: the boils had given birth to baby boils. Until recently her face had remained untouched, but now they’d spread there too. One of the boils, large and swollen, was just below her left eye, so that the eye could barely open; another was spreading over her lips. They were painful, so that everything she did was an ordeal.
Nora had brought Billie’s cats uptown, to her own place. She wasn’t happy about it—the cleanliness of cats was a big myth, and she knew they’d inevitably stink up her apartment. But there was nothing else to be done.
She bought a Polaroid camera and every day before she left for Riverside, she took pictures of the cats to give to Billie.
One night when Nora came home, Dolly wasn’t breathing. Louie and Edwin were off in the other room, unconcerned. Nora called an animal hospital on Broadway and they confirmed that they disposed of dead animals. She tried to brush Dolly’s fur one last time, but it was hard work—her coat was matted and gnarled. Although it made no sense, she felt as if she was hurting her, and put the brush away. Then she put her in a plastic shopping bag and carried her to the animal hospital. She could feel her little body through the bag, sliding around formlessly, a mess of bones.
She wished she hadn’t inaugurated the tradition of bringing pictures to Billie. When she went to Riverside the next day she showed Billie pictures of Edwin and Louie. Billie looked up, and Nora nodded. Very slowly, Billie reached out to her night table, where the previous days’ pictures were stacked, and she found a picture of Dolly. She ran her finger over it slowly. “She used to be so glamorous,” she said.
BILLIE WAS SHARING A ROOM with an old Frenchwoman named Juliette. Skin cancer had eaten away at the left side of Juliette’s face. She looked as if an animal had attacked her and chewed all the way down to the bone. But she was inexplicably cheerful, and she usually had enough strength to talk. One day when Billie was sleeping, Juliette propped herself up in bed and asked, “Is that your mother?” It sounded more like “muzzer.”
“My aunt.”
“She’s a courageous woman.”
“Why do you say so?”
“She was in great pain last night. I could see that. But she didn’t complain.”
Nora thought she should make conversation with this woman, as long as she was there.
“Have you been here long?” Nora said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Juliette managed a small laugh. “I don’t think anyone stays here very long.”
LATER THAT DAY BILLIE OPENED her eyes for a little while; she even tried to sit up.
“I’m not having much fun,” she said, in a dry, cracked voice.
“I know,” Nora said. “I wish there was something I could do to make it easier.”
NO ONE BUT NORA VISITED Billie; no one at all visited Juliette.
While Billie slept, struggling miserably for each breath, Nora talked to Juliette. Juliette told her her life story. She had worked as a teacher at the High School for Performing Arts in Manhattan after coming to New York in the 1940s and marrying a man from the Bronx. Her husband had been a college teacher—“a professor,” she said proudly—and had died twenty years ago.
Billie’s one love had also died decades ago. Within the city, Nora thought, there’s another city, a city of old women living alone.
“Oscar and I were democratic socialists. We spent our life fighting for a dream.” Juliette waved her hand weakly, indicating Nora-didn’t-know-what. “It doesn’t look like we did very well. But it’s still a good dream, you know.”
“Are you trying to recruit me for the cause?”
This made Juliette smile. “No. I don’t know. Maybe I am.”
ONE AFTERNOON BILLIE WOKE suddenly, with a worried expression. She didn’t move or speak, but she looked as though she was thinking intensely. Nora asked her if she needed anything, but she didn’t respond.
“Did you feed Dolly today?” she finally said.
Nora didn’t know if Billie had forgotten that Dolly died, or if she hadn’t understood it in the first place.
Nora didn’t say anything; she just smiled.
“It has to be the gourmet tuna fish,” Billie said.
40
BILLIE HAD BEEN PUT ON A morphine drip, and she slept about twenty hours a day now. When she was sleeping, Nora talked to Juliette; when Billie and Juliette were both sleeping, Nora sometimes left the room and talked to other patients. Coming here day after day, she got to know them. There was Mr. Arnold, a man in his nineties, who kept telling her the same story about the college football exploits of his son. There was Mr. Ursino, in the last stage of esophageal cancer, who told her, in a croaking voice, that he had no regrets, because a life without cigars wouldn’t have been worth living. Sometimes he begged Nora to smuggle some in for him. “Anything. It doesn’t have to be my Cubans. I’m not proud anymore. Just get me a pack of Tiparillos.” Nora couldn’t bring him cigars, but she could sit with him and listen to him talk about how much he loved them. That, she hoped, was something.
One by one, each in his own way. A man named Mr. Allan, with pancreatic cancer, talked nonstop about how badly he’d been “fucked” in life. His wife, his kids, his bosses: everyone had fucked him; everyone, he told Nora, had fucked him up the ass. She wanted to leave the room, but she made herself stay. She thought she might be helping him by letting him talk.
“Listen,” he said to her, “I have one last wish.” He smiled at her with a touching air of hopefulness. He motioned with his index finger; she moved her chair a little closer, and he gathered up his strength to bring his mouth toward her ear. “Here it is,” he said. “Before I go, I’d love to pis
s all over your face, you ugly bitch.”
Nora left the room. She tried to find some compassion in herself for this man, and couldn’t.
She didn’t encounter anyone else like Mr. Allan. Most of the patients at Riverside, if they were strong enough and lucid enough to talk, were grateful to have someone to talk to. A few of them, men and women, were strangely flirtatious, as if they thought that if they could prove themselves attractive to a young person, then death wouldn’t come for them yet.
Every evening, when she entered Billie’s room, Nora was brought close to tears of gratitude, fierce wild gratitude, to see that she was still alive. This gratitude didn’t surprise her. What surprised her were the feelings that came over her even with people she didn’t know. Talking to the other patients here, people she’d just met, she felt overwhelmingly, shockingly aware of them, in some way she couldn’t define. It was as though whatever animated each of them, whatever made each of them unique, whatever it was that would shortly vanish, leaving each of them a vacant house of flesh—it was as though that animating principle, call it the soul, was rising up, trying to cast itself into her, trying to leap from the dying body and onto safe and welcoming terrain, just as she herself had leaped off that boat last spring and out of her old life.
At home, at night, in bed, she could hear them, she could hear their voices: not only Billie’s, but Juliette’s; not only Juliette’s, but even Mr. Allan’s. Two days after her encounter with him, he’d died, and now that he was dead she could see that his sick last wish was a fucked-up manifestation, from a man who didn’t know any better, of the same thing she found holy in Billie, the same thing she found holy in Juliette. Juliette, with her hope of passing on the legacy of humanist socialism to someone young; Billie, with her extraordinary kindheartedness, her concern about whether her beloved cats were being cared for: both were trying to make a bequest of what was special in themselves, trying to make sure it wouldn’t be lost. Mr. Allan evidently had little to pass on but the desire to avenge his humiliations and the desire to humiliate. Billie and Juliette had something else: the capacity for tenderness, the capacity for care.
