The Loud Table

by Jonathan Carroll

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  There were just the four of us now, although it used to be five. Bill Hagar had died the month before. The colon cancer finally finished the job and there wasn’t much left of him at the end. Bill was the quietest of our group and the biggest coffee drinker. He said he mostly just liked to listen now because he’d spent his whole life talking. At this stage of his game, he only wanted to sit in the audience and be entertained by others.

  They called it the loud table because a group of bigmouths who loved to hear themselves talk sat together at the same table almost every morning and talked nonstop. That group was: Bill, Joe Beck, Dr. Lee, Conrad Meyers, and me. Conrad, who was German, called it our Stammtisch. My late wife once called it our clubhouse, and both of them were right. The day it was announced the coffee shop was closing for two months for renovations, all of us were flabbergasted. Because we spent so much time there, it was like being told to get out of our own house and live somewhere else while it was being fixed. But where were we supposed to go in the meantime?

  Old men are nesters. Give us a place to sit, chat, or read the newspaper in peace, and that’s all we want. Take the chair out from under our heinies and we squawk. The place looked fine to us—what did they have to renovate? The manager told us it needed new paint, new plumbing in the kitchen, and other stuff here and there. It had been twenty years since it had a face-lift, and now was the time. The work would only take a couple of months and then it would be ours again.

  There were other places like this in town, and the food in some of them was definitely better. But somehow, we’d settled on this one years ago and had made it our own.

  Old women have a knack for keeping busy, but old men don’t. Maybe we used up all of our busy before we retired. Look around and you’ll see what I mean—old women are always going off to lunch together or bridge club or museums or whatever. On the other hand, us men sit at home watching whatever dreck is on TV, or we read too much of the newspaper every morning. We used to have so many things to do in our busy lives, but now there are these big fat chunks of free time in a day that are like mile-long icebergs that we don’t know how to steer around. After retiring, I knew I was in trouble the day I caught myself watching an entire TV show at ten o’clock in the morning about candiru fish in the Amazon River. Right then and there, I turned the TV off and said out loud to an empty room, “I’ve got to find something to do.”

  I didn’t play golf, I didn’t bowl. Cards bored me and so did most other games. What I liked doing was talk, gab, shoot the breeze with people who had something to say. One morning, while looking for a good glazed donut and a place to read TIME magazine, I happened onto this establishment. I’d known Conrad Meyers for years. When I walked in and saw him, he called me over and introduced me to his friends. It was like stepping into a bakery when you’re hungry. These guys had been around; they’d seen things. They brought me right into their conversation like I’d been in it all along. We talked about everything that first day—politics, sports, women—and I had a great time. When eventually they got up to leave, I asked if I could join them the next day if they were planning to meet again. They welcomed me then and every time I saw them after that.

  What would we do now that they were taking our Stammtisch away? We had to find another joint to set up our loud table, but where? Joe Beck, who was sort of the unspoken leader of the group, asked for suggestions. We looked at each other like someone might have an answer, but all of us shrugged no in our different ways. So, we went on a hunt for a new temporary home away from home.

  For a few days, we tried that nice converted firehouse over on Walpole Avenue, but coffee there cost a fortune and we’re a bunch of pensioners on budgets who drink a lot of coffee. So, we shuffled our thick soft shoes over to Cynthia’s next, which we heard good things about. The coffee is decent but they play music there all the time, play it loud and too much of it is Madonna, so need I say more? Once when he came back from the toilet and Madonna was on, Conrad started dancing when he got close to our table. Dr. Lee told him he danced like a chicken. I asked how a chicken danced. The doctor stood right up and started dancing too, if you could call it that. His interpretation of how a chicken danced really wasn’t so far off from what Conrad was doing.

  After he sat down, Conrad said, “I had an idea just now—what about we try going to Tough Nut?”

  Joe’s voice was both indignant and incredulous when he answered, “That gay café?”

  Conrad nodded. “I hear it’s very nice and they serve great cakes.”

  “But it’s for gays, Conrad.”

  “Ja, so what? We’re looking for a place to drink our coffee, not find a date.”

  Joe glared at him but said nothing. Conrad looked at Dr. Lee and then at me for approval.

  “I say why not? We’re four old fuckers who haven’t had an interesting new experience in twenty years. And I’m always up for a good piece of cake. We’ll be lucky if they even let us old ugly guys in to the place.”

  “Speak for yourself. Just the other day I was told I’m still a very handsome man.”

  “By who—your mirror?”

  * * *

  Tough Nut turned out to be a really nice cafe. The fellows who ran it and their clientele were a friendly, generous bunch who treated us, well, sort of like rare tropical birds. Because how often did four old straight men show up at the door of their establishment? We went there often while our coffee shop was being renovated. The only problem was it opened at eleven and all of us were usually up and about around six in the morning. We were used to getting together at our old haunt around eight a.m. just as the doors opened. Old men don’t sleep much. Don’t sleep much, don’t eat much, piss much; we are walking clichés of what old men are supposed to be like—men that once upon a time we never ever thought we would become.

  The most interesting morning we spent at the Nut was when the owners Jared and Steve sat down with us and Steve asked quite directly what it was like to be old men. I know nothing about gay life but I could see something of that was wrapped up in his question, so it deserved a particularly honest and straightforward answer. Us old owls were quiet while thinking it over, and then I spoke first.

  “I keep wondering if I was walking down the street and bumped into my younger self, would he recognize me—the old man he was going to become? Would he see anything of himself in me? You know when you look at pictures of yourself or someone else you know well when they were children? You can almost always recognize something in their face, or the way they stand, or an expression that stayed with them as they grew older. Well, besides my old face and body now, would young me see anything—any little bit of himself in this old man? Recogni
ze any similarity or connection between us?”

  Jared said when he went to his twenty fifth high school reunion, he only recognized about half his male classmates, sort of identified others, and way too many of the faces he never would have connected with the kids he knew when he was eighteen. They looked completely different.

  “Invisibility,” Joe Beck said, apropos to nothing. We waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

  “Invisible what?”

  “You get more and more invisible as you get older. Haven’t you felt that? People don’t see you. Or if they do, you’re only something in their way, an obstacle, like a chair or a big rock. You’re just another object blocking the sidewalk. Haven’t you noticed how impatient people get around us when we don’t move fast enough?”

  Conrad disagreed. “The way you’re describing it, Joe, we’re just the opposite of invisible, because we’re always pissing people off for being in their way.”

  Dr. Lee spoke for the first time. “No, I know exactly what Joe means. Haven’t you noticed how loud or angry many seniors are? Shouting at the bus stop, scolding their dogs or kids on the street, ranting to themselves, pushing their way into the checkout line at the market … Last week I saw an old crow of a woman snatch a jar of peanut butter out of another woman’s hands even though the shelf right next to them was full of that brand. I think it’s all because they’re, we’re ignored or unnoticed so often that we do feel invisible sometimes. I know I do. Clearly, some believe by shouting or showing anger, people will finally pay attention to them, even when it’s just for small things. What’s ironic is both old people and young children have a lot of time on their hands. Neither of them needs to be in any hurry, because they don’t have much to do. But from the way they squawk, the old ones sound impatient or pissed off at too many things—too many trivial, silly things. Like it or not, people do pay attention to the guy who keeps honking his horn.” He was silent a beat or two and then said in a wistful voice, “There’s no cure for old age. No one recovers from it.”

  A kind of thick, sad silence hung over our table like early-morning fog in Scotland, all of us silently acknowledging the truth of those lines.

  Conrad said, “You know what I wish? I wish one thing, just one single thing in my life stayed the same. Do you know what I mean? That our hair didn’t turn white, the dog didn’t grow old and die, or our kids had stayed eight years old and adorable … Just one single thing we could hold onto and not worry about it growing up or getting old or needing renovations.…”

  I smiled and said, “It’s an interesting idea, but what would happen if that one thing turned out to be horrible or something you hated? Like you never left third grade and that monster Mrs. Prentice stayed your teacher?”

  “You’re being facetious and I’m not. I want one single thing in my life to remain the same right up until the day I die. Then whenever I get the feeling life is slipping through my fingers like sand, I can turn to that one fixed thing and hold tight, knowing it will stay that way till I’m gone.” For emphasis, he said the last part of the sentence slicing one hand down into the other like an ax into wood.

  Silence fell over the table again; each of us probably mulling over the idea and, I’m sure, thinking what we would like to stay the same in our lives until the day we died.

  But it surprised me to hear Conrad say that, because he seemed the most contented of our small gang. He was a wise and generous man, enough so that by the time old age knocked on his door, my impression was he’d welcomed it as best he could and graciously moved most of his past out of the guest room so this new presence in his life had a comfortable place to stay.

  In contrast, the rest of us grumped and whined, raging too much and often at the dying of the light. We certainly wouldn’t give our old age two cents if it had asked for a loan. If I had to sum Conrad up in one word, I would choose amused. He seemed mostly amused by life and people. He also had a capacity to forgive that I could only admire. But now here he was out of the blue saying this and it troubled me.

  Almost as if he’d read my mind, he looked straight at me. “When I was younger, I had a girlfriend. She was like a thousand-dollar perfume—unique, gorgeous, but then gone much too soon. It was for the best though, because in the end, we weren’t really a good fit. But the other day, she came to mind for some reason, and I couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like. It made me miserable. This goddess loved me for a while. She did. I’d look at her then and think this amazing woman loves me—she actually loves me. It was one of the high points of my young life, but now I can’t really remember what she looked like. Sort of, kind of, but not really. I read a book once that said in the end, all we have left is our memories. Well, I don’t know how close I am to the end, but already some of my best memories are abandoning ship. I can’t tell you how much I hate that.”

  Kind Jared, who was at least twenty years younger than any of us, tried to lighten the thought. “But at the same time, doesn’t it help with the lousy things that happened in your past? Aren’t you glad to have forgotten some of the bad times, or people who made your life miserable twenty or however many years ago?”

  Conrad smiled but shook his head. “Sure, but the problem with memory is it doesn’t discriminate when it loses things. It’s not like it pans for gold, separating precious memories from the dirt. I think we’d all agree”—he threw a hand out in a sweeping arc to indicate all of us old boys—“that we want to keep as much of our past in our heads as we can at this point. I’ll gladly live with my bad memories so long as I know the good ones are up there too 100% as well.” He tapped his forehead with a finger.

  “Besides, you don’t miss many things when you’re young, because life is just so full and engaging. But when you’re old, you miss so much that used to be part of your life, both big and small. This sounds silly, but yesterday when I was getting a massage, I realized I wasn’t ticklish anymore. It made me sad. When you’re young and annoyed anytime someone tickles you, you never think there’ll come a day when you miss it but you do.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Conrad walked home with me. He lived on the other side of town, so I thought this detour was only because he was in the mood for a little exercise. I was wrong.

  “They think I have Alzheimer’s disease. There are no exact tests for it, so they only can judge by the symptoms. They don’t know if it is early-onset Alzheimer’s yet, which is the worst, but it looks that way.”

  For the moment, I didn’t say anything. How do you respond when someone who matters a great deal to you says they’ve been given a death sentence?

  “Do the others know?”

  “Lee does. But only because I wanted to hear his professional opinion about how long he thinks I have and what are my options. I’m going to tell the others soon.”

  As a small in-joke, we always called our friend “Dr. Lee” instead of just Lee because his whole name is Lee Li and that kind of cracked us up when someone said it, including Lee. Especially after Bill Hagar said the first time he was introduced to the doctor, his name sounded like that of a panda in a zoo. But the flipside of his echo’y moniker was Lee Li had been a highly regarded oncologist before retiring. So, it made complete sense Conrad went to him first with his grim secret.

  “That’s what you were talking about back at the cafe, about not being able to picture your old girlfriend anymore.”

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t answer this if you don’t want to, but how bad is it now? How badly has it affected your memory?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out, and looked away. “I have trouble typing. I have trouble spelling. Yesterday, I looked at the keyboard and for a few seconds didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.”

  I said nothing while waiting to ask him one question—one single question. But I needed to wait until he led me to it.

  “I’m telling you now because you said your wife had Alzheimer’s before she died.”

  I nodded.

>   “Is it all right if I ask you some questions about it?”

  “Of course, Conrad, but can I ask you something first? When you close your eyes at night to go to sleep, have you ever seen an intense green? A very special, almost electric green—like bright light that’s been shone through an emerald? Or the green of some wonderfully exotic fish in an aquarium? It didn’t last very long but if you’ve seen it, it’s memorable.”

  Conrad looked both surprised and puzzled at the same time. “Yes! Yes, I did two nights ago. How did you know that?”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Then you don’t have Alzheimer’s, my friend. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  He looked at me with a combination of great skepticism but with hope peeking over the edge. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  Coincidentally, we were only a block away from an internet café. For a few moments, I considered going in there to show him. But despite having known Conrad a long time, I had no idea how he would react to my proof. So, I thought it best to invite him over to the house, where I could do it discreetly, just in case he freaked out. When we got to my place, I asked if he wanted coffee. He shook his head, understandably eager to see my proof that he didn’t have Alzheimer’s.

  Since my wife Stephanie died, I’ve lived alone with her moody marmalade cat that is a pleasant-enough housemate, especially after those 3741 enervating, unhappy days of marriage to Stephanie. Cats are loners that keep us company only when the mood strikes them, which is perfect for me these days. From my experience, they are neither smart nor stupid animals but simply supremely self-satisfied creatures that assume they rule whatever small worlds they inhabit, and any other beings in their neighborhood are there to either serve, feed, or amuse them.

  The cat was lying on top of my desk when I crossed the room. After picking it up and putting it gently on the floor, I sat down in front of the computer and turned it on.