Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  She sat up, her hands still on his father’s chest, her fingers rolling and unrolling his gray chest hairs as she spoke. “He had an airway so I pounded on his chest and breathed for him. I went on for a good twenty minutes. Afterwards I sponged him down.” She inclined her head toward a metal bowl of washcloths and soapy water on the floor under the window. Beside it was a box of Ivory Flakes and he thought that maybe she was proud, wanted him to know that she had changed the sheets before Dan arrived and aired everything out. Next to the box of soap stood a can that looked like air spray, which probably accounted for the sweet chemical odor in the room—and she had combed his father’s thin hair and at least gotten the undershirt on.

  Dan watched her crying quietly. She was sitting just as she had been when Dan entered the room, her back against the wall, her head inclined toward his father’s head in her lap, her fingers feeling their way over his dark face. And Dan realized he felt completely strange before this woman, who was grieving for his father whom she had loved, it seemed, and who had perhaps loved her, for years.

  He thought again of touching her shoulder. He thought of telling her the rest of that joke—the star pupil wanted Churchill to be the father of her child because she’d heard him say, “Eet veell be long and it veell be hard. Ve veell do it on the rooftops, ve veell do it on the beachheads …” He thought of helping her off with her receptionist’s coat and her tight pair of jeans and getting into her where his father had just been warm and alive. (Had he come, the poor bastard? No, he’d apparently missed out, but only that last once.) Should he slap this woman around out of respect for his mother? He’d never slapped anyone around, let alone a woman.

  His eyes dry and gritty, Dan sat motionless on the bed.

  They dressed his father, Rosemarie getting the undershirt off and back on right side out, label in back, while Dan hoisted up the dead man’s heavy chest at the armpits. He was repelled at touching his father’s buttocks, at grazing his sparse gray pubic hair with his hand as he helped her shimmy up the green-gold boxers. They spent a quarter of an hour lifting and rolling his father’s dead weight into his cotton slacks and the maroon knit shirt with the alligator on the pocket. Rosemarie couldn’t find his socks. She said she had extras, but Dan shook his head, feeling some distaste about actually seeing the drawer (drawers?) where his father kept his things. (Just how much clothing did his father have here? Besides being in each other’s company all day at the office, had they gone out evenings, gone dancing? What did they do, whatever did they do?) He looked under the bed with his penlight for the socks (only dust there), looked in the disordered bathroom (open lipstick containers and soiled cotton puffs on the counter), and in the stuffed hamper. Finally, although it seemed a mistake, he just put his father’s sandals on his bare feet.

  Then they moved slowly, jerkily, down the stairs, Rosemarie walking backwards holding the feet, Dan holding the torso at the armpits, feeling the weight in his lower back, at the same place he felt it when he bent over to do a pelvic or pull out a kid. He had the strange thought that he was really helping carry a chest of drawers, or a couch, and he should have hired movers. Had Dan renewed his disability coverage? This could lay him up for weeks.

  Did his father have any life insurance, had he left anything for his mother? Pediatricians were the worst-paid doctors, right down there with psychiatrists. And his father was an improvident type, had been involved in one bad business scheme after another—once Dan’s mother’s piano had been carted off, supposedly to pay debts, and another time his father almost lost the house. Circumstances of death the only thing he had in common with Rockefeller.

  In the dark, one of his father’s arms made a dull wooden sound as it collided with the banister. Dan signaled to Rosemarie. While he rested against the banister for a moment listening to her son’s even breathing below, listening to their own harsher breathing and at the same time trying to figure out how in God’s name he might earn a few extra thousand bucks a month for his mother (Dan almost groaned aloud), he watched Rosemarie set his father’s legs down carefully on the steps, then try to fold the arms up on the chest. But they were unyielding, two poles.

  Still no sound from his father.

  Suddenly on the dark stairway Dan was gasping for air. He wanted to shout out that he was alive, he was suffocating, he would collapse and fall down the stairs …

  Rosemarie whispered, “Are you all right?”

  He held up one finger to indicate he needed a minute, then sat down on the stairs, holding his father’s head in his lap. Dan forced himself to take slow shallow breaths, build up some carbon dioxide in his bloodstream. He was breathing like a tornado, hyperventilating. He mustn’t faint, mustn’t leave her alone.

  After a few moments he felt less woozy, although mildly ashamed of himself. Slowly they got the body down the stairs, through the kitchen, where Dan noticed again the picture postcards tacked haphazardly to the fake wood paneling. He suddenly wondered if they could be from places his father and Rosemarie had visited together—his father had attended a lot of professional meetings. Dan remembered receiving a postcard of a silver beach in Acapulco—was that where some pediatric association had held its meeting? Had he considered going (there were some neonatal talks, if he had the right meeting) but his father dissuaded him?

  They carried the body out the back door, down the steps, and pushing and pulling and yanking, hiked it onto the front seat of Dan’s car. Dan sat rigid behind the wheel. If he was rigid, he couldn’t faint, right? Rosemarie was in the passenger seat by the window, his father in a sort of slumped-back position between them, legs hardly bent. Dan kept an arm like a strap across the dead man’s chest. Rosemarie got his father’s head close to her shoulder, as if he were asleep or drunk. She held his father’s hand.

  Although Dan wanted to floor the accelerator, he drove slowly through the deserted side streets. Rosemarie and he did not speak. They passed a police car parked beside the golf course, a policeman in the front seat with a bleached blonde whose hair seemed to be burning in the dark. They were smoking and they paid no attention to Dan.

  I am in bed asleep beside my sleeping wife.

  His wife would think he’d gone berserk and maybe he had, because otherwise what was he doing out here in the middle of the mad night slithering past the orthodontist’s office where he’d had his braces applied as a boy (“Are those tears coming out your eyes? They’ll be coming out your ears before I’m done with you,” Dr. Heller, the orthodontist, had said as he tightened the fifteen-year-old’s braces, and Dan had never told his father from fear he’d kill Dr. Heller); past the squat candy—now video—store behind which Dan and two buddies had smoked their first cigarettes (“They’re for my father,” Dan, who’d been delegated to buy the pack, had offered unasked, pronouncing them “Pell Mells,” as in the old television commercial); past the turreted junior high school with its black playing fields and tennis courts where Dan had won (unseen by his father, who had been suturing a boy’s torn lip, or so he’d said) the Under-Fifteen Rough Riders Tennis Tournament.

  Had his father been carrying on with Rosemarie way back then? No, impossible, Rosemarie had been only a girl herself. But had there been others? For God’s sake, was that boy, that Ali, his half brother? No, no. Rosemarie had been married to a male nurse and had a child, this child, and later got a divorce. Dan was almost sure. Besides, she’d said “my boy.”

  Well, what was she supposed to say?

  Had his mother kept her eyes deliberately shut? She’d fought a deep-freeze war with his father all her life, and this escalation, if known to her, would have atomized the marriage. Besides, his mother would never have stood for his father’s having any pleasure.

  Dousing his headlights, Dan pulled onto the noisy gravel driveway, then watched Rosemarie’s largish—voluptuous?—can sway in the white coat as she made her way to the rear door of the flagstone house that had served as his father’s office. Zaftig, his father had called her without Dan’s picking up o
n anything: his father was always commenting on women’s bodies—TV actresses, waitresses, store clerks, passersby.

  Dan’s wife’s body.

  As he watched Rosemarie lean over the lock, he wondered what there had been between her and his father besides the old in-and-out: Camaraderie? Passion? Love? What went on between a man and a woman who was twenty years younger? If his father had wanted Dan to know, he would have told him himself. Or maybe he had tried to tell Dan, and Dan had failed to decipher the code. As he watched Rosemarie now returning to the car, her layers of clothes sticking to her so that every curvy curve was thrown into bold white relief, Dan remembered his father once mentioning that his nurse sweated like a basketball player.

  Dan got out of the car, and he and Rosemarie carried the body across the driveway, barely managing to keep it above the gravel. How could it be so hot so early in the morning? How unreal, how numb he felt! His thoughts seemed to be occurring at a certain physical distance from his head, as if they weren’t his or were stillborn at the moment he thought them. Suddenly he felt terrified he would drop to his knees holding his father and howl. Without giving any warning, he began to walk faster, almost to run, and Rosemarie tripped and nearly fell. “Sorry, sorry,” he whispered.

  Inside they hoisted the body onto a child-size gurney, which they wheeled through the dark storage room, Dan training the beam of his small light in front of Rosemarie, who moved cartons of supplies and stacks of records out of their way. One of his father’s feet pointed uncomfortably close to Dan’s crotch. They proceeded past the examining rooms, into his father’s office, where the facade of the Basilica of San Marco glittered from the surface of his desk. (His father’d bought that garish desk in Venice maybe five years ago. Hadn’t there been a symposium in Venice, hadn’t Dan gotten a postcard?) Dan eased his father into his leather chair, Rosemarie guiding the head carefully down onto the shining desktop.

  Her own head slumped over as if she were mirroring the dead man. “Do you think if we hadn’t been—do you think if we’d stayed watching television?—this wouldn’t have happened?”

  Although he had wondered himself, he smiled uncomfortably. “People can get pretty excited watching television.” To stop smiling (although she probably couldn’t see his face), he frowned. “He must have thrown an embolus into his brain, or he ruptured a major vessel.”

  “You think so?” Her head rose a bit.

  “Well, I’ve seen a sudden death from an embolus—an amniotic fluid embolus, but it should work the same way.” By its whiteness Dan found a lab coat in his father’s closet and took it off the hanger. Aiming his small light at his father and laying it on the desk, he began pushing one of his father’s cool hands into the sleeve of the lab coat. While he whispered professorially at her (he was whispering, wasn’t he, not howling?) about the circulation of blood in the brain, Dan fed the shoulder in, threaded his father’s stiffened hand down and out the sleeve.

  Rosemarie said, “Do you think if I’d injected epinephrine directly into the heart? I mean, if I’d had it in the house.”

  “You wouldn’t have done him any favor. He must have suffered massive brain damage.”

  “You think so?” Rosemarie asked almost eagerly, turning fully toward Dan, who was working the other shoulder into the coat. “What are you doing?” She sounded as if she had just now noticed.

  “We want the police to think he came in because he was worried about some patient, maybe that baby with AIDS. He looked at some slides. He sat down at his desk. He dropped dead. Where does he keep the slides? Still in the kitchen?”

  “What do you need the lab coat for?”

  Dan shrugged his shoulders. “You look at slides, you wear a lab coat.”

  “Sam was hardly a stickler for details.”

  “What do you need yours for?”

  She looked at her white coat and the pajama top beneath it. He imagined her flushing.

  “It’ll authenticate the story,” he said, although he was not sure what story he was authenticating. As he got the other arm through, he blurted out, “Does my mother know?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think they talk enough for her to know anything.” Rosemarie sounded bitter, as if she were personally affronted by the relationship between his parents.

  “It was kind of you to call me.” He looked away.

  “I was thinking about Ali, about his waking up with Sam dead there, the police. He was very fond of your father.” Her voice wavered. “Do you know they played baseball together? Your dad took him to a few Yankees games.”

  He never took me to any Yankees games.

  Embarrassed, as if she could read his mind, he quickly said, “Look, we need some kind of story for the police. In case my mother doesn’t know. I could say he was in the office working late and he called me because he felt acutely ill and I drove out and found him.”

  In the dark Dan raised his own objections: “They’ll ask why didn’t I call 911, or the ambulance or whoever you call out here … Why didn’t you call 911?”

  “I am 911,” she said. “I go out with the ambulance.”

  A low farting noise sounded from the body. Dan picked up his father’s wrist and felt for a pulse. The sound erupted again—a gurgle—and a dark stain began to spread from the seat of his father’s pants, down one leg, and onto the industrial gray carpet. He wanted to throw a cover, some kind of shield over his father. In the dark his father’s forehead seemed ash colored, his elbow was gashed, and the back of his maroon shirt was torn and dirty beneath the lab coat. Although he knew the provenance of every bruise—that he himself must have gashed his father’s elbow when he dragged him across the driveway, Dan found himself wondering why he had accepted this woman’s story so readily. Someone walking in might think the two of them had rolled and killed the old man. Rolled him for his debts. Probably left a mountain of them. “He looks like a murdered derelict.”

  Rosemarie began to wail.

  He rose on tiptoe, moved his finger stupidly to his lips lest he wail himself. He tried not to imagine the tears coursing down her face, dampening her starched coat.

  “There must be another shirt around.” He began riffling through his father’s desk drawers pointing the flashlight.

  “Leave him alone, it’s enough.” Still crying, she started for the door.

  “We have to have a story for the police.” He felt like a determined lunatic. Having found a wrinkled short-sleeved cotton shirt in a drawer, he began trying to get his father’s lab coat off. Papers fell off the desk and onto the floor.

  “I’m going home. Maybe my boy is awake.”

  Dan grabbed her wrist. With his other hand he stood holding the short-sleeved shirt.

  She said simply, “I’ll tell the police not to say anything to your mother, if that’s what your worry is.”

  “Don’t they have to write the circumstances and the place on the death certificate?”

  “Not the circumstances. The place, yes, and the time. They’ll approximate the time. Look, everyone knows me,” she said. “The police, the undertaker—Buddy Lerner’s the undertaker. I’ve known him since fourth grade. I’ll ask him to do me a favor.”

  Just like that? Dan had to figure this out. “It’ll take only a few minutes to get off his lab coat and change his shirt and wash his face.”

  “Who you kidding? Let go of me, I want to go home.”

  Surprised that he was still holding on to her wrist, and also, it seemed, to her waist, to her warm flesh, of course he released her.

  “I can clean him up in the morning,” she continued. “I’ll find him in the morning when I come in to work and I’ll tell everyone he must have had a stroke.”

  “And a seizure. And you tried to resuscitate him. Banged him up more.”

  “Okay. The truth. A seizure and a stroke.”

  “But you have to have his car here. You can’t have his body here and his car at your place.”

  She nodded. “I’ll drive it over in the m
orning. Let go of me.”

  “I’m not touching you.” He moved several steps away to make sure she saw he had let her go. “But what about your car? How will they think you got to work?”

  She felt through his father’s pants pockets and slapped the keys into Dan’s hand.

  He drove her home. When she got out of the car and walked up the dark steps to her house, he felt unspeakably lonely.

  He found his father’s leased red Jaguar parked two blocks from her house. The car was a beacon, a torch, he would be stopped by the police—he felt a spurt of fear that momentarily overcame his loneliness as he drove the car to the office and left it in the driveway.

  It was an hour’s walk back to Rosemarie’s. He walked briskly along the finally cooling suburban streets, the white flowering magnolia trees lit up ghostly in the graying dark, past the golf course, the green smell of black grass. He had a sudden memory of prairies, of a childhood vacation out west. It was one of the few vacations his busy father had been able to take—he was always at the hospital, making house calls, talking on the phone to other doctors … Dan had spent his childhood yearning for his father. His mother had stayed in the hotel the afternoon he and his father had visited the thousands-of-feet-high ruined dwellings of the Anasazi Indians. Standing holding his father’s big hand at the edge of the cliff with the bright blue cloudless sky and orange sun above them, he’d had the commonplace thought that if they made one misstep, his beloved father and he would fall to their deaths together. It had been an awful but thrilling thought.

  And now his father had died alone. No, not alone. Without him. With another.

  He heard the sounds of hundreds of frogs from the golf course. He heard his footsteps. Although he was exhausted, he knew he could not sleep. He wondered was anyone lying awake in the houses he passed, was anyone listening to his footsteps, watching him through a window? He wondered how it could be that his eyes were as dry as if the tear ducts had been cut out of them, and he was walking along a street at five thirty in the morning wondering if anyone was hearing him, if anyone was watching him. Was his father watching him?