Isn't It Bro-Mantic?

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Of course. Also, do you think I could maybe get in there for a few minutes before I go?”

  “Please be careful,” a pale-faced Helen urges me as she heads back into the bathroom and I turn to exit the mini-suite.

  Why would I need to be careful?

  But then I realize why as a cramp seizes me.

  Go back or go forward?

  Never since Hamlet has such a momentous debate raged.

  Eventually, though, I decide to go forward. After all, how embarrassing would it be to return to Helen now and tell her that after promising to get help, I don’t have it in me? Or at least not that. Plus, I’m already on the other side of the door, the hallway side so, like a National Football League quarterback who’s already begun his motion, I’m committed to completing the play.

  This leaves me no choice but to tighten my sphincter by squeezing my butt cheeks together ever tighter, which causes me to walk like a bowlegged, swaybacked nine-months-pregnant lady as I lurch my way down the hallway, around corners, down stairs and stairs and more stairs, around another corner and then another hallway until I get to the Infirmary, only to discover:

  There’s a line.

  Well, of course there’s a line.

  And it is excruciating to wait in it as it moves at a snail’s pace—I won’t even detail the contortions I go through to keep things together—but at last I make it to the end and as I once was at godawful Yankee Stadium, I’m in the front row!

  I go into the small office that is the Infirmary and there’s the doctor: a shrimpy old guy with glasses and a bowtie. I don’t know what I was expecting: Dr. Patrick Drake from General Hospital, maybe? Whatever it was, it wasn’t this.

  “So,” I say, trying to be genial, “this is some sweet deal you’ve got here. Cruise-ship doctor? Must be great.”

  And why am I making small talk when I have more, um, pressing needs?

  Oh, right. Because, as Sam endlessly points out to me, I’m the idiot that does things like this, only to wind up with every single guy in the world wanting me to be his Best Man.

  But apparently my usual charms are wasted on this guy because he just stares at me with a sour expression as he says, “On call twenty-four hours a day and crammed into this shoebox—do I look like I’m having a luxury cruise-ship experience here?”

  “Well, when you put it like that…”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “I guess you’d say my problem is, um, scatological.”

  “Come again?”

  Seriously? I’m an educated guy, he’s an educated guy, or at least I hope he is—do I really have to spell this out for him?

  He just keeps staring at me and I realize that, yes, apparently I do.

  “I got a bad case of the shits, doc.”

  “Well, doesn’t everybody,” he says dryly.

  “Oh,” I say, hooking a thumb over my shoulder to indicate the line I just waited through, “is that what they have too? What do you think it is, some kind of food poisoning?”

  “No.”

  Well, there’s a hard and firm diagnosis.

  “But my wife’s got it too,” I say.

  He regards me over the tops of his glasses. “And did you and your wife eat the same things for dinner last night?”

  I think about this. “Well, no,” I say. “She had the shrimp, I had the steak. She got a side salad, I went for the potato.”

  Geez, all this talk of food isn’t helping my stomach any.

  I try to go on. “She had—” But the doctor cuts me off.

  “Did you both have even one item that was the same?” he presses.

  I think about this too. “No,” I finally conclude. “We didn’t even both have bread and I had the cheesecake while she had the—”

  “It’s not food poisoning,” he says, cutting me off again, and I’m thankful for this because it saves me from saying and hence thinking about “chocolate mousse.”

  Oh, crap. I just did. Think about it, that is.

  “Well,” I say, “even if we had different stuff, maybe it was prepared in the same contaminated water or something?”

  “How many times do I have to keep telling you? It’s not food poisoning.”

  “OK, then what is it?”

  “You’re suffering from a norovirus.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, please. Like you could distinguish a norovirus from a rotavirus if I explained it to you.”

  Ouch.

  “Let’s just say it’s highly contagious,” he says. “One person on a ship gets it? Half the people on the ship get it. But it won’t kill you. Why, in about twenty-four to sixty hours, the situation should resolve itself all on its own.”

  “Twenty-four to sixty hours? But this is supposed to be my honeymoon!”

  “Yes, well, and these are supposed to be my Golden Years. We can’t all get what we want. Just be sure to keep hydrated. Take plenty of fluids, preferably containing sugar and electrolytes.”

  “But isn’t there something I can take? This is brutal.”

  “I can give you something.”

  He goes to a cabinet, takes out a bottle, shakes something into a cup and hands it to me.

  I look down. There’s just one pill there.

  “Just one?”

  “I can’t give you more than that,” he says. “In cases of severe abdominal pain—which you obviously have—it can be dangerous to take even over-the-counter remedies, plus they can prolong the pain. Being as you’re in obvious distress, however, one pill won’t kill you and it may alleviate the worst of the symptoms for a few hours so you can at least get some rest.”

  “But what about my wife?” I say. “She’s really sick too.”

  “You expect me to give you a pill for your wife without examining her? But that would be unethical! No, I’m afraid she’ll have to come here on her own if she wants a pill. Now, take it.”

  I go to put the pill in my mouth but then I think, wait a second. How will Helen, in her condition, ever make it down here under her own steam? It’ll never happen. And she’s suffering.

  Then I do put the pill in my mouth, but instead of swallowing it, I only pretend to swallow it for the doctor’s benefit and then tuck it under my tongue.

  “You’re a Yankees fan, aren’t you?” I say, but it comes out all lisped and garbled since I’m holding that pill down with my tongue.

  “Come again?”

  “Never mind,” I lisp/garble some more. “Thanks a pantload for all your help.”

  Then I exit the Infirmary, doing my bowlegged, swaybacked pregnant-woman routine all the way back to the room.

  When I get there, I find Helen sitting gingerly on the edge of the bed, looking positively drained. I put my hand behind her neck and lower my face toward hers.

  “Johnny,” she says weakly, “I don’t think this is the time…I’m not really up for…”

  I press my lips to her half-opened ones and drop the pill I’ve been concealing onto her tongue—thank goodness I’m so dehydrated from being sick because otherwise, no doubt it would have dissolved already—then I pull back.

  If one of us is going to feel better sooner rather than later, let it be Helen.

  “Swallow,” I say.

  After she does so, I hurry to the bathroom and shut the door behind me.

  I do remember saying those vows about “in sickness and in health” just two days ago, but I never thought they’d come around to bite me on the ass so quickly like this.

  Stuck in Port

  A wide balcony view seems like a fantastic idea until you wake in the morning, after twenty-four hours of being sick and taking care of someone else who is sick, and you look out at all that moving blue-green water.

  “What a gorgeous day!” Helen cries with glee.

  Well, at least one of us is enjoying it.

  Yesterday, after getting back to the room and giving Helen the pill, I hurried things along in the bathroom in case she might need to use it
again. But when I came out, she was fast asleep on the bed. I doubt the pill could have done anything so quickly—I think she was just worn out from being so sick—but sleeping did work some magic, particularly since between bouts of my own sickness, I kept her supplied with cool towels for her forehead. I even woke her every few hours and made her drink things so she’d stay hydrated.

  And now it’s a new day, the ship has docked in a new port, and Helen looks as though she was never sick in the first place, while I’m still feeling…

  You know, I’m not feeling as bad as yesterday, but I’m still not feeling anything remotely resembling good.

  “So what do you want to do today?” Helen says. She’s wearing the Cerulean Sky bikini she wore on the first day and she’s got some brochures in front of her and I’m guessing that while I was still sleeping, she went down to the shore-excursions desk and picked them up.

  I explain about the not-feeling-as-bad-but-still-not-feeling-good thing and Helen drops the brochures and comes over to the bed, lays a cool hand on my forehead.

  “Poor baby,” she says. “I wish I could do something for you. I still can’t believe what you did for me yesterday, giving me the one pill so I’d get better quicker.”

  I guess I am a pretty great guy.

  “I know,” she says. “Why don’t I go down to the Infirmary? I can pretend I’m still ill and get the doctor to give me a pill and then I’ll do the tongue-hiding thing like you did so I can bring it back to you.”

  “That’s a sweet offer,” I say, grabbing onto her hand and kissing it. “But I think the worst has passed. I think if I just stay here and rest today, I’ll be good as new by tomorrow and then we can at least enjoy the last port stop together before the ship turns for home.”

  “That sounds great,” Helen says, but her smile is a bit off. It’s not like she’s not trying—I can tell she’s trying to look genuine—but that smile is still off. “I’ll just stay here today, in case you need anything.”

  “You know what?” I say. “Don’t do that. Instead, why don’t you go to shore, take in the sights, spend the day doing whatever you want to do.”

  “Really, but—”

  “I’ll be fine here. Hell, I’ll probably just sleep the whole time. You’d only be bored.”

  “I’d never be—”

  “Go, Helen. I’ll be fine.”

  “Really?” And now her smile is genuine, it’s so wide, and I can tell she’s just itching to get out there and meet the day full on.

  “I love you.”

  “Oh, I love you too,” she says exuberantly. She puts her hands on either side of my face, kisses me square on the mouth, before adding, “So much.”

  And then she grabs her carryall and she’s gone.

  I spend most of the day alternately sleeping and drinking fluids and going to the bathroom. It’s finally mid-afternoon and I feel like I’m pretty much done with all three of those activities, at least for the time being, so I click on the TV. I start flicking through channels until I come across some talk show I recognize. I recognize it because it’s whatever that crapfest is that comes on right before General Hospital.

  Over a year ago, ABC began replacing its existing soaps with talk shows because, supposedly, the audience for daytime soaps is going down. Also, because talk shows are a lot cheaper to produce. So far, two long-running soaps have met their premature demise that way and there’s ongoing rumors that GH will go the same sorry route and that Katie Couric will take over its spot. I’ve got nothing personally against Katie Couric—for an older woman, she’s got a nice set of wheels, and she’s even a pretty good journalist—but I need my Carly Jacks fix in the afternoon. Carly Jacks is one crazy chick. And now that she’s kind of with Johnny Zacchara? Their chemistry is off the charts!

  But wait a second. If this crapfest is on the TV now, then maybe that means…

  I look at the clock and when I hear a familiar voice, I turn back to the TV.

  Ooh, there’s Patrick Drake—I was just thinking about him yesterday!

  I settle in to watch, as happy as I can be at the serendipitous events—the bathroom bouts notwithstanding—that have conspired to bring it about that I am able to watch GH for the first time since last Thursday. I didn’t get to see it last Friday because I was too busy doing pre-wedding shit and I’ve been on this boat since Sunday without even realizing I could watch this here and now it’s Wednesday, so I’ve missed three episodes.

  But wait a second. They’re talking about something and I don’t understand this. They’re saying that Robin—Robin Scorpio, Patrick Drake’s wife; Robin Scorpio, who’s been on the soap like forever—is dead. How is such a thing even possible?

  “How is such a thing possible?” I scream at the TV, rising up to my knees and clutching my hair. “Robin is dead?”

  This information is so shocking, I don’t know what to do with it. The soap mag said something bad was going to happen to her, but this?

  Then, as the show cuts to commercial, I remember we’re in port now and that maybe my cell phone works. Quickly, I call the one person I know who will care about this as much as I do.

  “Sam,” I say when she picks up, “what the fuck is going on? How can Robin possibly be dead?”

  “She’s been dead since last Friday,” Sam says in a bored tone of voice, like this is old news.

  “You mean you knew about this and you didn’t tell me?”

  “What—and spoil your wedding? I do know how you feel about Robin.”

  This is true.

  “So how’d she die?” I ask, not sure I really want to know. But, you know, I have to know.

  “Explosion.” There’s some chomping so I know Sam is eating. She’s probably in my place, eating my food and drinking my beer and watching my TV. Well, my old place. After next week, and the closings on my condo and Helen’s house, that place will be someone else’s and I’ll be moving into the house I bought with Helen on the other side of town.

  I hope that if Sam’s consuming all my consumables, she’s at least taking care of Fluffy while she’s doing so.

  “Robin was working on that serum to save Jason’s life,” Sam goes on. “You know, from that brain thing he’s got? But then some toxic chemicals spilled, she insisted on going back into the lab for the serum even though Patrick begged her not to, then the emergency door locked shut behind her to protect the rest of the hospital from the spillage, she had enough time to get the vial to save Jason into some little slot in the door and Patrick was able to get it on the other side, but then, well, with all those toxic things spilling in that small closed space—kaboom!—she was vaporized.”

  “Vaporized?”

  “Well, all the rescue worker gave Patrick afterward was her wedding ring, so I guess you’d call that vaporized. There was no indication of there being any other remains left.”

  “It sounds awful.”

  “I know, right? And poor Patrick, he was watching through the window in the doorway, so he saw his wife die right before his very eyes.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “See now why I didn’t tell you earlier? I knew you’d react this way.”

  She’s right. I’m absolutely devastated. It’s like I’ve lost a member of my family.

  “Of course now,” Sam continues, “naturally, Patrick’s on a rampage, refusing to save Jason’s life with the serum because saving the stupid serum cost Robin her life. It’s a big fucking mess. Oh, shh, show’s back on.”

  I settle back down to watch, with Sam still on the other end of the line, and we continue to talk during commercials.

  “So how’s Fluffy doing?” I ask after they cut to the break following Police Commissioner Mac Scorpio receiving the news that the niece he raised as his own daughter has died trying to save a hit man.

  “He’s good,” Sam says. “He’s settled down a bit now that he’s gotten used to you being gone, plus I’ve been spending more time over here.”

  I knew it.
Still, ouch on the cat. I wouldn’t have thought I could be replaced so easily, even with just a feline.

  “I’m sure he misses you, though. He keeps looking at me like, ‘Hey, what happened to The Man? Did he do something bad like I did that time when I got sent to the basement?’”

  “Poor guy.”

  “I know, right? And poor me too. It’s not the same not having you right next door.”

  “Well, I haven’t officially moved out yet.”

  “No, but you will be moving straight into your new home as soon as you get back, so.”

  Show’s back. Poor Sonny. He totally breaks down when he learns about Robin. Well, who can blame the guy?

  “Things good with Lily?”

  “Never better,” she says.

  “Everything going OK with the jobs so far this week?”

  “Good enough. Oh, by the way, you were right about the Ryan job and Hidden Lagoon. That was totally what the customer wanted, even if she didn’t know it herself.”

  Of course I was right. Paint is the one thing I know. Paint: It never lets you down, and I never let it down.

  More GH and now it’s Carly talking to Shawn. I used to have high hopes for Carly and Shawn, but now that I’ve seen her with Johnny Z, I just hope the writers let this one ride for a while. And now Patrick’s talking to Jason’s wife, Patrick’s refusing to save Jason’s life and then it’s fifty-five past the hour. End of show.

  I click off the TV.

  “Robin was vaporized,” I say, “so there was no body. You don’t think that somehow Franco’s still alive?” Franco is a recurring psychopathic character named Franco who also happens to be played by the Hollywood actor James Franco. It’s all very meta. “I mean, I know we saw Jason kill Franco and all, but maybe that’s just what we’re supposed to think? Maybe in reality Franco is really still alive and he just orchestrated all this to get to Jason like he’s always doing?”

  “Never mind that now,” Sam says. “You’re supposed to be on your honeymoon and yet you’re watching GH while yakking on the phone to me. What gives?”

  So I explain about the norovirus.

  “Oh, I’ve heard about those things,” Sam says. “Harsh. That’s why I never take vacations. Too much shit can happen. So you’re both sick with this thing?”