by Jonathan Dee
He wasn’t the only one. A custom developed whereby one would hang some personal item – a shoe, a bag, a sweatshirt – from the doorknob of a given bedroom to signal that it was occupied. One or two rooms were usually so reserved at any hour. In some cases, most verifiably Milo’s, this was because he worked best in the middle of the night; when he heard the kitchen staff banging around shortly after dawn, he would put down his brushes and go upstairs to sleep until lunchtime or so. But there were rumors that the bedrooms were being used for other purposes, at night and during the day as well. Olivia, the former gallery assistant from San Francisco, and Daniel, John was urged to observe, were often out of sight at the same time, usually just before lunch.
There wasn’t a great deal of work to do just then. One Friday, with Osbourne’s permission, John left early and drove down to Hilton Head to spend a weekend with his parents. It was September, and the air smelled like cherries as he drove with the top down in the darkness toward his mother and stepfather’s development. He got lost, briefly, inside the main gates, before finding the right condo; he had been there only two or three times before. The last time had been with Rebecca. When he walked in the unlocked door he saw his stepfather, Buzz, in pajamas and bathrobe, reading in a chair inside a circle of lamplight. Buzz smiled and closed his book. “Your mother couldn’t wait up,” he said. He hovered, beneficently, until John had his bag moved into the guest bedroom; then he announced he was going up to bed himself.
After Buzz was gone and his door closed, John reemerged from the guest bedroom and paced through the house in the darkness. The place had been redecorated again; there was nothing in view now that he recognized from his childhood home. Nothing, even, from the post-Buzz years; so it didn’t have to do with considerations of that sort, an effort not to haunt her new husband with relics from the life of the first one. Perhaps even in their seventies they wanted to feel that everything was before them – they didn’t feel comforted, but rather threatened, by objects which reminded them of all the years that now loomed behind them. It all seemed worth sorting out to John only because of the nagging sense of failure he had begun to feel every time he entered his own apartment back in Charlottesville. The rented room, the haphazard furniture, the books still in boxes, the neighbors who weren’t really neighbors. It didn’t seem to him the way a man now in his thirties ought to be living – no connection to anybody, no sense of personal history.
Not much else happened of note on his weekend visit. In the morning his mother made biscuits with sausage gravy, just as she used to do on weekends when he was a teenager, and then while he ate she talked to Buzz across the table about how much she missed Rebecca, what a wonderful girl she was, would it be too awkward now if she tried to stay in touch. John played a ritual round of golf with Buzz and two of his friends – he never touched a golf club except on these visits home, a fact which never seemed to register with Buzz – and John did not begrudge the three old men their undisguised pleasure as a boy their sons’ age struggled to keep up with them in this pseudo-physical contest.
Back at his apartment a message from Elaine warned him of a meeting Osbourne had called for first thing Monday morning. “New client,” Mal said, as a few of them were still finding their seats. “This one is national. Four TV spots, three thirties and a sixty, and two print campaigns, one one-page and one for an eight-page insert.”
He sat and stared at them for a minute as they drank their coffee.
“That’s it,” he said finally. “Meeting’s over. Go, get to work.”
They looked at one another. “Who’s the client?” Elaine said.
Osbourne scratched his chin. “As you know,” he said, “in the end I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the First National campaign. I’ve been spending a lot of time these past weeks thinking about why that is. I believe the answer is that as talented as all of you are, certain ideas are so deeply ingrained in you that it’s going to take some sort of shock to root them out. I’m not just talking to those of you with a background in advertising, either. I’m talking about certain very elemental, cultural ideas. We need to find a new approach to get around those dead ideas.”
Another silence ensued.
“So,” Elaine said finally, “then, I’m guessing you’re not going to tell us who the client is.”
“Correct. Nor am I going to tell you anything about what sort of business the client is or isn’t in. I do not want advertising. There are no reference points for you. Any inspiration here has to come from somewhere inside of you. Four TV spots, nine pages of full-color print, but we don’t need it all in one shot. Give me the keynote, the starting point. Don’t worry about budget. All the questions you’re going to ask me when I stop talking? Don’t ask them. You have until the twenty-seventh of October. Amaze me.”
JOHN AND MOLLY got to the San Francisco airport and discovered her flight had been delayed an hour; so they had a couple of drinks in the tiny, unenclosed bar nearest her gate, followed by a standing makeout session which had the other passengers staring. At the Albany airport, there was no one there to meet her, only a line of four taxis just outside the door to the baggage claim; the driver of the second said he would take her to Ulster for twenty-five dollars. The eight hours in between, except for the quick change at La Guardia, was time airborne, time nowhere: it gave the slowly sobering Molly a different sense of time entirely, the ways in which it passes and the ways in which it can fold back upon itself again or collapse unexpectedly. It was like flying backwards in her own mind. Even so, she was not anxious for that flight to end.
John had wanted to come with her, but she said no. The less there was to deal with, the better, and Kay’s reaction to something as unprecedented as a new boyfriend was too hard to calculate. It was dark when the taxi decelerated off the thruway, too dark to start picking out landmarks, but once they got to the center of Ulster, where the traffic light was, Molly became reoriented and she started feeling each turn of the steering wheel deep in her body. The lights in the house at Bull’s Head were blazing. Unseen, Molly walked up the path and opened the front door. Everything was instantly itself again, after more than a year. Kay was not in the kitchen, nor in the living room. Molly did not call out. She caught herself walking almost on tiptoe, not wanting to be heard. The one conspicuous thing about the house was that it was immaculately clean.
“Mom?” Molly called finally.
Every upstairs light was on, and the doors to all the rooms, including hers and Richard’s, were standing open. As Molly passed her parents’ bedroom, she saw her mother’s feet, in high heels, on the bed. Knocking softly on the wide-open door, Molly stuck her head inside.
Kay was asleep on top of the bedspread, her hands folded on her stomach. She wore one of her best dresses, deep blue with a thin white stripe above the hem, stockings, a string of pearls, and full makeup, as if she were getting ready to go out somewhere. A kind of chill went through Molly and, without really thinking about it, she walked furtively over to her mother’s side of the bed to satisfy herself that Kay was still breathing. Just as she was sure she had seen her mother’s ribcage go up and down, Kay’s eyes fluttered slightly and she woke up.
Mother and daughter, their faces inches apart, pulled back in fright. A second or two passed in silence; then Kay laughed and put her hand to her chest. “My, you scared me!” she said, sitting up, touching her hair. “I must have dozed off.”
She embraced Molly, without hesitation but not especially warmly either, as if they had seen each other just a few hours ago. Then she patted Molly’s shoulders and looked past her, around the room, as if trying to remember something. Her eyes seemed to Molly unusually bright.
“Were you going out somewhere?” Molly asked.
Kay looked once more around the overlit room.
“It’s just that you’re so dressed up,” Molly said.
“Thank you!” said Kay.
They went downstairs, where Kay insisted on finding Molly something to eat. Molly
nibbled listlessly on a tuna sandwich while her mother stood leaning against the counter, arms crossed, and stared at her.
“Where’s Richard, by the way?” she said suddenly. “Did he go straight to bed?”
Molly wished very strongly that Richard, or somebody, was in the house with them. “No, Mom,” she said gently. “Richard’s not coming. I think he told you that.”
“Well, of course he did,” Kay said.
That night Molly lay in her old bed, listening to the sounds of her mother moving around restlessly downstairs. When Molly saw her in the morning she was still in the same blue dress with the white stripe. Visiting hours at the hospital in Albany began at nine; it was nearly eight-thirty now.
“You go on,” Kay said. “I have a lot to do here.”
Molly stared. “I don’t know the way,” she said.
Kay’s mouth quivered a little bit, before she abruptly recovered her bright demeanor. “Okay, then,” she said. “Are you ready?”
The whole way there Kay narrated every turn they made. “Now a left on to Route 4,” she’d say. “Left off the exit on to Mortensen Road.” Molly realized that she was expected to pay attention to these remarks so that Kay wouldn’t have to make the trip with her a second time. Kay pulled up before the main entrance and put the car in park; but she did not turn the engine off. Molly put her hand on the door.
“You’re not coming in?” she said incredulously.
Kay smiled. “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “Your father will be so happy to see you. And I have some errands to run. It’s not easy being left alone, you know. I have a lot to take care of.” She pushed the button that raised the power lock on Molly’s door.
Molly was too flustered to remember to ask Kay for her father’s room number. She gave his name to the woman behind the high front desk, who typed it into her computer.
“Room eighteen-oh-eight,” the woman said, her face lit from below by the computer screen. “Left off the elevator, then left again, then right through the double doors.”
“Right through, or straight through?” Molly asked.
The woman looked at her in confusion. “Just follow the signs marked Psychiatric Ward,” she said, in a softer voice.
That’s where he was. Molly went through a metal detector and was buzzed through a set of steel doors which locked behind her, electronically and loudly. By the time she had gone past the dayroom – where grown, sometimes elderly men in exam gowns sat in front of a TV or talked into the air or stood in a corner, touching the walls – she was ready to weep with terror, even though no one she saw so much as noticed her. At the nurses’ station, losing her nerve, she asked first to see her father’s doctor; Dr Kotlovitz, she was told, was with an emergent patient but was expected back within the half hour. In the meantime, she could see her father if she liked.
Molly waited just beyond his open door, breathing deeply and flexing her fingers, for a full minute before stepping into the doorway and knocking.
It was her father, sitting up in the motor-driven bed, reading a magazine with his glasses on. But he wore a hospital gown, the thickness of a paper towel, tied together loosely at the back, a garment of shocking immodesty; his hair, grayer than she remembered, bore the unkempt, angular shape of someone who had not been out of bed for a long time, days, even; and because of this, the familiar, untroubled, oh-there-you-are smile her father offered as he dropped the magazine and struggled to swing his legs off the edge of the bed was not only unreassuring – its very familiarity was profoundly frightening.
He remained seated as they hugged; she tried not to look at the pale alarming expanse of thigh he showed as he slid forward on the bed. In a scratchy but cheerful voice Roger suggested that they take a walk. “To the dayroom, anyway,” he said. “That’s as far as they’ll let me go.” He held out his arm, and it hung there for a few seconds until Molly understood that she was now to hold on to it, to support him as he struggled to stand and then walk without losing his balance. It wasn’t pride, exactly, that made him pretend this infirmity was something the two of them took for granted, as if she had helped him out of bed a thousand times before – more a fear of seeing her hurt or disappointed, a fear so extreme he would carry this pretense of infallibility to the most ridiculous and tragic length, which length, Molly realized, they had now arrived at.
The dayroom was a long drab rectangle, about one-third of it, at that hour, flooded uncomfortably by sunlight through the blindless windows. In one corner, eight feet or so above the floor on a kind of triangular shelf, sat the TV; a dozen black chrome-and-plastic chairs were ranged in front of it. At the moment no one paid attention to it, though the sound was turned up; the four or five patients in the dayroom sat or stood isolated from one another, not talking unless to themselves, having come here, Molly imagined, mostly out of an atavistic craving for some sense of space. She took her father to a padded easy chair at the end of the room furthest from the laughter of the television.
Roger seemed awfully thin, though this may only have been an impression produced by the clinging paper nightshirt. “So,” he said to her. “How was your flight?”
Molly wished desperately there was some third person there to tell her what not to do – a doctor, ideally, though she would have settled for her mother or her brother, which is to say that she would have been happy even with advice that was clearly wrong. For now, she let herself be lulled into her father’s construction that everything was fine, that the setting of their talk had no bearing on the talk itself. It masked the symptoms of their fear.
“Fine. Very smooth. Mom wired me money for the ticket.”
“Did you see a movie?”
Molly swallowed. “Yes. It was … it was called Sleepless in Seattle.”
“Never heard of it. What was it about?”
“I really don’t remember,” Molly said. “Dad, can I—”
“Not Sleeper? The Woody Allen movie? Because I remember that one. Lord, that was a funny movie! Gene Wilder with the sheep.” He shook his head, remembering, and with unfathomable abruptness his head fell forward and he began crying.
Molly looked all around the dayroom, afraid she was going to need help; but no one, not the other patients nor the one attendant in the room, so much as glanced in their direction as her father struggled noisily to catch his breath. She turned back and took his hand, took both his hands, even as she felt him trying to pull them away from her.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” The words meant nothing. She said them because they tended to produce a certain tone of voice, which she hoped was worth something, as if she were speaking to a horse.
Roger kept trying, with astonishing feebleness, to pull one hand away, until finally Molly understood that he only wanted to wipe his nose. She had no idea why she had been restraining him. When he finally looked up at her again, sniffling and smiling, she could see in his confident expression that he had no idea what he looked like. His gaze shifted past her, around the eggshell-colored walls of the dayroom.
“Would you look at all these lunatics?” he said.
When Molly had him back in bed she returned to the nurses’ station and asked again for Dr Kotlovitz. He was a fat doctor, genial and perspiring, and did not react at all to Molly’s angry tone of voice when she asked why her father was on the mental ward.
“Standard practice with all attempted suicides,” he said. “On top of which it worries me a bit that he still won’t talk about what happened.”
“He’s a very proud man.”
“Well, I don’t just mean he’s being reticent, or doesn’t like having his privacy violated. I mean he insists it never did happen at all. Didn’t you ask him about it?”
Molly shook her head.
“He insists, and I think he really believes, that this was an accidental overdose. He took something like fifty Seconal. Obviously no accident. If he hadn’t vomited in the ambulance, I think we might have lost hi
m.”
“Seconal?”
“It had been prescribed to your mother. Whether she was hoarding it or whether she’d stopped taking it and he was refilling the prescription himself, I don’t know. He won’t talk about any of it with me, or even admit it happened. You should ask him yourself. I don’t know what your relationship with him is like – maybe he’d talk to you.”
“He’s asleep now,” Molly said nervously.
“Next time, then?”
Kay was sitting in the car in the hospital parking lot with the radio on. Molly knocked on her window.
“Is he feeling better?” she asked distractedly. Her attention was directed to the radio program, a call-in show, hosted by an angry, intemperate psychiatrist.
“He looks okay,” Molly said. “Listen, why don’t you slide over. I’ll drive.” They returned home without speaking; the car was a bubble within which swirled the voice of the woman psychiatrist, berating her invisible patients, broadcasting her contempt for their problems, intimately and nationwide.
Kay did not accompany her on any more trips to the hospital in Albany, though Molly went every day; in fact, Kay, though she dressed up smartly at some point each morning, never left the house at all that Molly could see. Her mother betrayed no awareness that everything was not as it should have been, or as it always had been. But for once Molly wasn’t eager to pull at the mask of normality settled upon the visage of life in the house, because she no longer wanted to see what was behind it. So when Kay put on her makeup, laid a towel over the pillow on her tightly made bed, and lay down and napped for five or six hours, Molly just got in the car and drove to town to pick up some food, because someone had to do it.
