Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  Like me, Jenny thought.

  “And Tommy’s parents,” Lee went on, gulping back angry tears. “That was so awful.”

  “I guess even if you know it’s coming—” Jenny suggested.

  “It wasn’t like that. They were upset all right, but they were mostly sorry for themselves. They didn’t do anything for Tommy when he was sick except send money. They came down maybe twice for a couple of days. They were embarrassed by the whole scene today, Tommy’s friends crying and one of the waiters at Henry’s Beach House coming to the church in full drag and sobbing out loud, with tears running down his makeup.”

  “Mm,” Jenny murmured, thinking that she too might have been embarrassed by this.

  “And now his parents want Tommy’s ashes, so they can put them in the family plot in Raleigh. They think that’ll make up for everything, show they accept him. They don’t grasp why everyone is enraged and Dennis won’t even speak to them.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  Lee shrugged. “We’re working on it. Tommy wanted to be buried in the Key West cemetery, he bought a plot there with room for both of them. But now his lawyer thinks Dennis should forget about that and scatter the ashes before the parents get a lawyer of their own. The whole thing is moronic, fighting over a cardboard box full of grit and flakes like cat litter. I said to Dennis, what do you care, if Tommy’s around anywhere he’s here with you. But he’s not rational right now.”

  Neither am I, Jenny thought. Look at me, she thought, not letting go of her friend. Speak to me. And finally Lee did.

  “So, how’s everything with you?” she said.

  “Oh, all right, I guess. And I think Wilkie’s better. Anyhow he’s agreed to be in this conference here next month on The Writer and Nature, you know?”

  “Yeah, I heard about it. My cousin Lennie Zimmern’s going to be there too.”

  “The one from New York who criticizes everything.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lee smiled. “Hey, I’m glad you’re here,” she said in a different voice. “Last night, when you didn’t call, I thought—”

  “I couldn’t, I didn’t dare.”

  “Never mind. You’re here now.” From a distance of only a few inches, Jenny and Lee looked at each other with the searching, fearful expressions of people about to jump into a dark, fast-running river. “Tell me something,” Lee asked. “Did you mean what you said yesterday?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” They were so close now that Jenny could see the separate springy dark hairs of Lee’s heavy baroque eyebrows, the faint scatter of freckles over the strong bridge of her nose. “Did you?”

  “Yeah.” Lee moved closer, and first offered, then received, a long, soft kiss. “You can stay for lunch, can’t you?” she asked finally, moving back.

  “Oh, yes,” Jenny repeated.

  “That’s great. There might not be much to eat though, except bread and cheese. I didn’t have time to shop.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I love bread and cheese.” Jenny smiled, and lifted her hand to stroke Lee’s thick, dark hair. I can touch her now, she thought. I can touch her whenever I want.

  “There might be some tomatoes. Let’s go see.” Lee started for the kitchen, then turned back abruptly, almost banging into Jenny.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, I’m just going to put on the answering machine.” Lee smiled. “We don’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Nobody’s answering either number,” Barbie reported, coming into the hospital room where Wilkie lay—no longer in acute pain but blurred, bruised, and exhausted by this pain, and by the many shots and tests and procedures he had endured over the past several hours, including one in which he had had to drink a glass full of thick, sickly-sweet, nauseating liquid chalk. It was the fourth or fifth time Barbie had tried to phone his wife, first at the lodge and then at home.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said, sounding as if he were speaking from the bottom of a cold, foggy well. “Jenny should have been home hours ago.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Better,” he managed. Physically, this was true. Mentally, however, Wilkie was frustrated and enraged. Why was he still alive? What was the point of such agony, if it wasn’t the prologue to a speedy death?

  “It doesn’t look like a heart attack to me,” the doctor on call (a small, skinny, probably incompetent young man) had said. “But I’d like to keep you under observation overnight, do some more tests, right?”

  “Awright,” Wilkie had agreed, confused by pain and thinking, You’ll find out you were wrong. A mistake. If he wasn’t going to die today, he had better get out of here as soon as possible, before they turned him into one of those half-corpses that are kept half-alive in intensive-care units for weeks and months producing profits for a hospital. Hooked up to tubes, and a machine to monitor his heart.

  And even if I do get out today, Wilkie thought wearily, it’ll be too late to swim. That means another entire day to drag through before it’s over. Again, as often in the past weeks, he saw Death retreating from him along the shore. He visualized him as a classical Ingmar Bergmanesque figure: tall, pale, stern-faced, skeletally thin, wearing a black, hooded cape and carrying a scythe and an hourglass full of dark sand. But that was wrong, he thought. Death was not retreating any longer, but turning to look over his shoulder, waiting for Wilkie to catch up.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” Barbie interrupted.

  “No,” Wilkie muttered. “Thank you,” he added, not managing to smile at Barbie, though he was, or should be, grateful to her. After she understood what was happening she had been reasonably competent. She had called a taxi, remembered that he would need his wallet and insurance cards, helped him into the cab, and accompanied him to the hospital. And once there, she had insisted on immediate treatment.

  “This is Professor Wilkie Walker, he’s a very important, famous person. You’ve got to take care of him right now, right now!” she had more or less screamed at the emergency-room staff, while Wilkie, half-fainting from pain, almost unable to speak, slumped in a plastic chair. “If you let him die it’ll be on TV and in the newspapers. I’ll tell them all about it, and everybody in America who cares about animals will hate you forever.” And almost immediately someone had located a doctor.

  If I wasn’t going to die, Wilkie thought, I’d do something for her, something for the manatee. (In his drug-blurred mind they were still merged.) A moving but scientifically sound essay in the Atlantic, say. Something that would counteract the public disregard for ugly endangered species—nonphotogenic, noncuddly.

  “... Or maybe Mrs. Walker went to the grocery,” Barbie’s voice said; apparently she had been speaking for some time.

  “Possibly,” Wilkie agreed faintly, opening his eyes halfway. Again he felt irritation at his wife’s foolish, low-status job. It was clear that she was being exploited, paid not much more than their cleaning woman back home. Normally he would have strongly discouraged Jenny from working at any guest house. But, wanting her to form local connections, he had decided not to interfere.

  “I’ll try Mrs. Walker again in fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Thank you,” he repeated. It occurred to him that seen from below and to the side, as he was seeing her now, Barbie Mumpson, like the manatee of whom she had reminded him, was what many people would call “cute” or “cuddly” rather than childish and overweight. The manatee of course was not overweight; it only seemed so because of its streamlined, fat-insulated shape. But so did seals and penguins, whose images were all over the museum and nature shops. With proper handling, and the right sort of illustrations—drawings, not photos—the manatee could probably be made to seem cute, even cuddly.

  “I appreciate your help,” he added, realizing that something of the sort was called for.

  “Gosh, that’s all right,” Barbie gushed. “It’s a privilege. I mean, really, it’s great for me to be some use to somebody, especially somebody like you.” She swallowed a
udibly.

  “Mm,” Wilkie said, his attention beginning to drift again. A children’s picture book, with a preface for their parents; that might be a good idea, he thought. He could probably get something down tomorrow morning, leave it for Jenny. Manny the manatee. Or did that sound too Jewish? And you had to think of the PC angle these days too. Maybe Manny and Annie. He could already imagine the stuffed toys, though, thank God, he wouldn’t be around to see them. Jenny and his agent would find the right artist and the right publisher, and the profits could go to Save the Manatee.

  “And I guess my husband had an excuse, in a way,” Barbie was droning. “I just kept messing up with reporters, and I couldn’t even give him a baby.”

  Irritated by the interference with his thoughts, Wilkie gave Barbie an impatient glance that she missed because she was staring at the floor. “Maybe he couldn’t give you a baby; did you ever think of that?” he said.

  “No, I—” She shrugged helplessly. “We were going to go for tests in D.C., but then everything got bad and I left. But it was probably my fault. I mean, everything usually is.” Her voice wavered. “So I was really low when I got here. But Mom says I’m just being selfish.”

  “Selfish?”

  “Well, yeah. Thinking only about myself, and not about Bob and how he needs me to support him and be there for him. A wife belongs with her husband, Mom says.”

  Though in general Wilkie agreed with this statement, he said nothing. Why was Barbie telling him all this? he thought. Why did she imagine he was interested? If she would go away he might get some rest.

  “Anyhow, Mom said if I didn’t go back it could ruin him, was that what I wanted? Didn’t I love him, like I promised in First United Methodist?” She gave a wet sigh.

  “Mh.”

  “So I said, I didn’t know if I loved Bob now, not really. But she said that didn’t matter, and it was my Christian duty to forgive his sins and cleave only unto him.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wilkie’s frown deepened. He despised religious cant and managing women, and in their only meeting he had formed an aversion to Myra Mumpson, who had asked if he were the author of “that sweet little old book about the mouse.”

  “Only the thing is, when I think of going back to Washington, I just can’t bear it. But if I don’t, it’s like I’m no use to anybody in the world, and I should just go down to Higgs Beach and drown myself, you know?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Wilkie said. Was everyone in Key West planning to imitate him in this farcical way? He gave Barbie Mumpson a look of great irritation, which she missed because she was staring out the window into the hot, pale sky.

  “It’d be easy,” she went on, “because there’s no lifeguard. So I thought I’d go real early some morning, like five or six, when it’s still pretty dark and nobody’s around.”

  “I hope you’ve given up that stupid idea,” Wilkie said as strongly as he could. “You’re a healthy young woman; you have your entire life ahead of you.”

  “Yeah, well, you can have my life. All it is is one big mess.”

  “So? You can change it.”

  “I d’know,” Barbie replied vaguely, not admitting this. “Anyhow I’m sorta glad I didn’t drown myself yet, or I wouldn’t have been home today.”

  “No,” Wilkie agreed.

  “I mean, that kinda made me feel like there was something I could do, you know? Usually I just think, I’m alive, but what for?”

  Wilkie turned his head on the stiff hospital pillow to look at Barbie. Her thick untidy yellow hair, her plump shoulders slumped in the pink T-shirt, her expression of confused despondency. It would be just like her to go and drown herself at Higgs Beach before he could do it. Then when he did, he would be part of a trend.

  “There are plenty of things you could do,” he muttered crossly, casting about for examples.

  “I d’know,” Barbie muttered, raising her head a little.

  “For example, you could stay in Key West and get some kind of useful job.”

  “Like what?” She snuffled up tears and stared hopefully at Wilkie. Feeling exhausted and incapable of further encouragement, he shut his eyes.

  “Maybe I should try Mrs. Walker again?” Barbie said finally. Wilkie, feigning sleep, did not answer; and after a while he could hear her leaving the room.

  The sooner I get out of here the better, Wilkie thought as he lay there. He had a long-standing hatred and distrust of hospitals. Under a pretense of public service, the system was infantilizing and commercial. When you were too weak and frightened and in too much pain to protest, they took away your clothes and forced you into a wrapper that reminded him of the baby clothes his children had worn in the first months of their life: flimsy limp cotton garments tied with tapes. And the hospital bottom line was money. Though he was obviously in agony when he arrived, possibly dying, before anyone would even speak to him they had to see his insurance card.

  “Well-well, Professor Walker.” Halfway to sleep, Wilkie opened his eyes again reluctantly. The sissy little doctor stood looking down at him. “How are you doing?”

  “Not bad,” Wilkie admitted.

  “Well-well. You know, I was absolutely correct. There’s no cardiac trouble. No sign of anything of the sort. In fact, your heart should be good for another twenty years.”

  “Really,” he mumbled skeptically.

  “My guess is, you’ve had a gallstone attack. That’s what the tests suggest.”

  “Really?” Wilkie frowned, unconvinced. “But the pain—”

  “Oh, that’s standard. Gallstones can be really nasty. Famous for it.” The doctor smiled, showing small, even, yellowish teeth. “But nobody ever died of them.”

  “Ah?”

  “You’ve never had an attack like this before?”

  “No. I told you that already.”

  “Well-well. If you’re lucky, you might never have another. And incidentally, Professor Walker, you’ll be glad to know that the barium X ray shows a very healthy digestive system.”

  “How do you mean?” In spite of himself, Wilkie’s voice rose.

  “All clear. No sign of any obstruction.” The doctor paused, checking Wilkie’s face for comprehension and apparently not finding it. “No sign of a malignancy, for instance,” he added, lowering his voice as he pronounced the dreaded word. “We were a little concerned, naturally, because of the rectal bleeding.”

  “Bleeding?” Wilkie bleated. I have been found out, he thought.

  “You hadn’t noticed it?”

  “No,” he lied. “You mean, you’re telling me,” he said slowly, trying to clear his head, “that I have rectal bleeding, but in your opinion I don’t have, for instance—” He took a breath “—cancer of the bowel or colon?”

  “That’s correct.” The little doctor positively smirked. “But it wouldn’t hurt to do something about those hemorrhoids when you get home, especially if you see any more blood in your stools. You should be checking for that regularly at your age.”

  “Ah,” Wilkie muttered, trying to evaluate the information he had just received. Keys Memorial was a nowhere provincial hospital, and this doctor was a wimp and an asshole. Possibly he was too dumb to read test results correctly and realize that Wilkie was terminally ill with heart disease or cancer of the bowel or probably both. “So I can go home now, right?” he asked.

  “Well-well, no, I wouldn’t recommend that. I would strongly recommend that you stay here overnight and get a good rest.”

  “Hmph,” Wilkie said, marveling again at the belief of the medical profession that anyone could get a good rest in a hospital. But he did not waste time on the paradox. What he had to consider was that possibly he was not going to die of a heart condition, at least not immediately. He could get on with his life; that is, with his death. But not today. It was already late afternoon, and after what he had been through he doubted that he had the stamina to swim out far enough. There was no hurry, after all.

  “So I’ll look in again early tomorrow morn
ing,” the little doctor was saying. “Oh, and before I forget, Professor Walker. Could I have an autograph? My nurse is a great fan of yours, it seems.”

  “What? Uh, certainly.”

  “Great.” The doctor produced a pen and a prescription pad. “Her name is Bessie.”

  Awkwardly, Wilkie raised himself on one elbow, causing his head to spin. He scribbled the name as he had done so many times before, and now perhaps for the last time, adding the usual meaningless phrase, “With best wishes” and his signature.

  “Thank you,” the little doctor told him, removing the pad and pen. “She’ll be thrilled.”

  13

  AT ARTEMIS LODGE, THE following day, Lee Weiss sat behind the desk trying to match guests and rooms for the months of April and May. Ordinarily this was easy, since by then the rush of refugees from winter began to slacken, and after mid-April it was mostly only Canadians who still wanted to come.

  Now, though, Lee was finding it hard to concentrate. Every few minutes she raised her eyes from the schedule to stare out the window into the green jungle beyond, and think of Jenny. Sometimes, remembering her cool, soft voice, her cool, soft skin and the sudden warmth of her last kiss, she smiled. Then she frowned, recalling Jenny’s panic on the phone when she’d called an hour ago.

  “I should have been there with him,” she had kept on saying, just as she had when she called from the hospital last night, “and I wasn’t.”

  “No,” Lee told her. “You were with me. Are you saying that makes it worse? Would it be better if you’d been at the grocery?”

  “No—yes—I don’t know.” Jenny laughed nervously.

  “That’s magical thinking. If you go on that way, you’ll be telling me next that when you said you loved me, it gave your husband a pain in the chest.”

  “I know it’s silly,” Jenny admitted. “But I feel so awful. I wish I could see you.”

  “Then come over, why don’t you?”