Now, near the start of her precious six months, she surprised them all. (He hadn’t yet seen her. She’d returned only recently from her devastating tests at the hospital.) Report had it she had become gracious, solicitous, a hostess of last resort. Having taken herself seriously all her life, she would, he supposed, treat her last months on earth with all the composure—whatever lingered of her madness was a sort of composure, a kind of sky-high deportment grander than Messenger’s in his Sunday best—of which she or any other terminal human being was capable. It was—Cornell knew he was wrong to feel this way—Sam who had most of his sympathy, and not only because his wife was dying. He had it because in Sam’s place Messenger would have felt put upon, outraged even, the duties of nursing become a sort of horrible, ultimate housekeeping he could not have held up under. Bedclothes, laundry, picking up children, taking them to lessons, preparing meals, even paying bills——these were things Messenger would not or could not do. He did not condone his sloth. Detail crippled him. Errand raised him to rage, then reduced him to tears. He was overwhelmed by such things, a man content only with contentment, truly happy only when others, too, were at leisure, made nervous even as a guest if his host was not as comfortably seated as himself. He was a summer soldier, a sunshine patriot, a good time Charlie.
So they had called and been given a time for their audience. (Visits as such were forbidden. Always formal, punctilious about their hospitality, mixing their guests with the scruples of pharmacists, Judith and Sam had in misfortune become tyrants of timing.) They parked their car and walked up to “The Cottage.” (The Glazers’ home seemed exactly what it was called on the sign above its small screened porch at the side, the only house in this neighborhood of $100,000 to $125,000 homes—their inflated values—to have a name. There was something vaguely European about it, or British——its brown woodwork, the flowered wallpaper in its living and dining rooms.) Though it was no smaller than the homes surrounding it, it seemed so. There were pebbles beside the walk leading to the front door, bushes growing in the center of the lawn, great cement urns beside the steps which dwarfed the tiny flowers they contained, making them look, for all their color, like so many cigarette butts or discarded gum wrappers. Inside, the rooms were ugly, the sofa and chairs protected from their two elderly dogs by thin blankets. The Oriental rugs were threadbare, the stuffed chairs deflated. One wouldn’t have guessed Judith an heiress, her husband the head of his department.
Messenger rang the doorbell, annoyed as always by the “Operation Ident” decal on the window of the front door. Thieves were warned that all objects of value had been “etched for ready identification purposes by the appropriate law enforcement agencies.” That meant the stereo and Sam’s expensive camera equipment, purchased at discount in duty-free shops in the Middle East when the Glazers had spent a year abroad. (They had gone around the world and their house was tricked out like the gift shops of selected international airports.)
Sam opened the door, looking, as always, confused by visitors. “Oh,” he said, “hi. Judith’s on the phone. All right, come in.” He seemed feverish to Messenger, the eyes in his youthful face—he was seven years older than Cornell but looked ten years younger—lustrous with mucus. “The phone company put in a special phone with hold buttons. Judith gets so many calls we really need it. Now if someone calls while she’s talking, she gets a signal that there’s a second call on the line. All she has to do is excuse herself, put the first person on hold and take the message from the new caller. It works just like the phone in my office.”
“Who shines your eyes, Sam?”
“What? Oh, yeah. I haven’t been getting much sleep. Judy? Honey? Here are the Messengers come to see you.”
The woman waved at them to sit. Messenger waited while Sam chased the dogs from the chairs. Judith Glazer chatted amiably on the telephone, her skin as jaundiced as her blond hair. Sam had disappeared.
Messenger had the impression she was performing for them, dragging the call out till someone else rang up so she might demonstrate the complexities of the new phone. She prattled about third parties, alluding to people Messenger had never heard of, would never meet. Her speech was for Sam too, he thought, off and busy somewhere in the house, her voice raised theatrically, its octaves just beyond her vision. She spoke with all the authority of her doom, arranging with only a minimum of consultation all the car pools of ordinary life. She spoke not as if she were not going to die before the winter was out, but as if she was never going to die.
Sam returned with the glass cylinder from a blender. It was filled with some sort of pinkish malted. He poured out the thick pink liquid for his wife and set the cylinder down on a community newspaper. Messenger noticed that the yellow hold button was lighted. “If we’re interrupting——” he said.
Judith shook her head, her strawberry mustache like a third lip. “Sit still,” she said. “Talk to Sam. Comfort Sam.”
Sam smiled. “People have been wonderful,” he said. “Judy’s lining up next week’s dinners.”
“Next week’s dinners?” Paula said.
“They bring casseroles, roasts, full-course meals. Bunny Fletcher’s coming over later to barbecue steaks for us.”
“What a way to go,” Messenger said comfortingly.
“It’s a picnic,” Sam said.
“We heard about it when we were still in Vermont,” Paula said. “Bill Richards told us.”
“What else did the provost say?”
Paula shook her hands helplessly, lowered her voice. “He told us about the prognosis. I’m sorry, Sam.”
Sam shrugged. “Bill’s been super. He stayed with me in Judy’s room during the exploratory. Adrian was there, too.” He looked down at his fingernails. “When the surgeon told me what they’d found, Adrian held my hand. How do you like that? He just took my hand and held it. When we got to the restaurant the chancellor was already there, waiting for us. Bill must have phoned him, or Adrian. Anyway, there he was, waiting for us. He still had jet lag. He and Bunny had just flown in from London that day.”
“Who picked up the check,” Messenger asked deliberately, “dean, provost, or chancellor?”
Sam laughed. “Life goes on,” he said.
“What’s going on?” Judith said, her phone call ended. “Why am I missing all the fun?”
“ ’Cause you’ve got cancer,” Messenger said, stripped of diplomatic status and settling for bad taste in this house of bad taste where Consumer Reports lay on the surfaces of the furniture like coffeetable books. Sam’s meanness was famous. Even Judith, who came from money, an heiress who would never now collect her birthright, whose great expectations had been shut down by the doctors and who, though her wealthy, highborn, Episcopal parent be struck dead that afternoon or catch the lightning in his hair, would never live through probate, joined in this joke on Sam. Who brooked no criticism of him, whose trigger-happy anger was always at his disposal, always in his defense, as much a species of big brother to him as wife, permitting no slight to her slight Jew and going along not so much dutifully as obediently with all Sam’s bargains and schemes, all his duty-free, marked-down, consumer-reported tchotchkes and appliances, his Sam Goody records and bulk film, his examination copies and suits by Seconds—and Sam a clotheshorse—and international flights by mysterious charter clubs and groceries from a co-op some assistant professors and grad students had founded, his order actually smuggled into their kitchen by some eligible TA. Why she even enjoyed his fabled economies, the fabled part anyway, encouraging them, Messenger supposed, as a harmless outlet for an anti-Semitism she had been unwilling entirely to surrender, writing them off as a cute trait of her clever Yid, much, he hoped—oh, how he hoped, his sense of propriety in the balance now—as she accepted the hold buttons on her telephone and the command performance dinners and her jaundiced skin the color of Valium, and her cancer.
“I never,” she said, “objected to your bad taste, Cornell. It only matters that you love me.” And she waited for
his declaration.
“Of course I love you,” Messenger said, the heat on.
“All right,” Judith said, swallowing malted, refilling her glass from the cylinder, extending the glass. “Drink,” she said, “it’s delicious. There’s no medicine in it. It’s only a strawberry malt. I take it to fatten me up for when I start my chemotherapy on Thursday. Will you drink from my glass?”
“I’m already fattened up,” Messenger said.
“Maybe the Messengers would like to hear our news,” Sam said, suggested.
“They may hear our news when they have broken malted with us. They may hear our news when they have sipped from the glass touched by my pancreatically cancered lips.”
“Sure, Judith. Gimme,” Messenger said.
“Here,” she said.
He downed all the malted. “Gee, Judy,” he said, “there’s nothing left for you.”
“The news, of course, is that I’m dying. Well, that’s my news. People are so embarrassed by other people’s deaths that I’ve drawn up a sort of list—— ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Judith Glazer’s Death But Were Afraid to Ask.’
“First. The girls know. I told them as soon as I learned the results of the operation. Milly doesn’t accept it yet, I think. I mean she doesn’t believe it will happen. That’s unusual, because of the two she’s the more mature, though she’s younger than Mary. We told the two of them together. Mary’s the one who cried. Now she wets the bed and goes around stinking of urine. Well, I understand rage. It’s always been one of my subjects. But she’s twelve years old and almost six feet tall and she won’t change her underwear and goes about soiled and——”
“Look,” Messenger said.
“Oh, you’re just like Milly, aren’t you? Isn’t he just like Milly, Sam? He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t accept things.”
“I accept things.”
“No,” Judith Glazer said, “if you don’t want to know you can’t accept things. Oh. You’re embarrassed. For all your tough talk, you’re embarrassed, gun-shy. There’s hope for you. Shyness is a kind of love, too. Like chugalugging from the cancer cup.”
“Come on, Judith,” Messenger said, “cut it out.”
“Standing up to me is. It’s all right. If I bring you these messages from the deathbed it’s not because I want to rub your nose in things you aren’t up to, but because I love you, too, Cornell. I never loved Paula. Paula, I’m sorry but it’s true. Perhaps I will now, I can’t be sure. I shall certainly have to try. You, for your part, Paula, you shall have to try, too.”
“I’ll try,” Paula said.
“Do. Please do,” the woman said, and went on. “Have I told you about the girls? My medication’s wearing off, my pain confuses me. Where was I? Oh, yes, the girls.”
“If you’re tired, sweetheart,” Sam said.
“I have cancer, not fatigue. Try not, please, to be humiliated by me. You never were before. All those years I was crazy. Stand by me now. These are the facts, pet, this is the way I wet my bed. Humor your horrible wife.” She had been lying on the sofa. Now she sat up, her housecoat parted and her nightgown hiked. Messenger saw her bald, prepped groin and looked away. “I shall make a family man of him yet. I’ve barely more than five months, but we’re well begun. Oh, yes, we make furious love.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t think the Messengers…”
“Of course they are,” she said, “but even if they aren’t…As long as I have strength to speak and warn I shall use that strength to speak and warn. There’s grime in even the purest death, things the clearest-headed among us wouldn’t expect. Well, the children are an example, aren’t they? Oafish Mary and tender Milly. Their grandfather and uncle try to turn their heads, to bribe their attentions away from truth. The fact is they’re quite successful. They are. My girls will remember their mother’s passing as a shower of gold. Tennis and swimming and private lessons. Golf and horseback riding and dinners at the club——all lovely summer’s fine rare prizes. They’re going to the academy this year. Daddy’s paying their tuition. I don’t mind. It’s hard for kids. Milly doesn’t believe me and Mary pees her bed.
“But I haven’t told you yet how we do it. The stitches and pain and my cancer shining through my skin like sunlight. How does he get it up, do you think?”
Sam got it up and left the room. He went through the small dining room into the kitchen.
“Poor Sam,” his wife said. “I won’t talk behind his back, only out of his line of sight. He hears me now. You hear me now, don’t you, Sam? You’re listening to all this, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Sam said, his voice fainted by the intervening rooms.
She lowered her own voice. “How does he get a hard-on? He wills it. It’s his decision. Why, it’s no more trouble to him than acquiring a tan or arranging his hair. It’s biofeedback, Sammy’s sex. Decisive grooming, like the way his pants hold a crease or the fact that his hands don’t get dirty. And there’s no weight. Our skins barely touch. Platonic fucking. Orgasms like something shuttled back and forth in a game. Because he never comes until I do.” She was speaking normally again. “You don’t come till I do, do you, Sam?”
“I’m a gent,” Sam said in the kitchen. “I’m something in armor, something in tails.” He was crying.
“Baby, don’t cry,” Judith said. “Hush, courtly lover.” And he hushed. “Bring me a pill, Sam.” They heard the faucet in the kitchen. Sam appeared with a pill and a glass of water. “See?” Judith said. “Thanks, darling.” She turned to the Messengers. “See? My last few months like a sort of pregnancy. See? Judith lying-in with doom and whim and old Sam hard by all hand and foot to fetch all the pickles of the grotesque, we never close.
“Sam, Sam, you Jew, you Jewish husband. Shall we tell them our news?”
“We’ve told them everything else.”
“No,” she said, “no we haven’t.” She turned to Paula. “Once, maybe two or three years ago, we gave a party. Cornell brought the ice, do you remember? Sam had called at the last minute to ask one of those gee-it-must-have-slipped-my-mind favors of his. Though we know better, don’t we, know that nothing ever slips Sam’s mind, that his mind goes around in galoshes and snow tires, radials, chains, and Cornell was high, stoned, and I’d been talking about TM, and your husband asked me to tell him my mantra. Do you remember that? Do you, Cornell?”
“I think so,” Messenger said. “Yes.”
“Yes,” Judith Glazer said. “And I wouldn’t tell you. Well I’ll tell you now. Lean toward me, I’ll whisper it.”
“I was kidding, Judith. I don’t have to know.”
“Suppose what I tell you were my last words? Not have to know what may be a poor dying woman’s dying wish?”
Messenger looked helplessly at his wife. She was already packed, checked out of the motel, all gone. He looked at Sam, similarly fled, browsing inside info on cordless telephones in Consumer Reports.
Messenger got out of his chair and went toward the poor dying woman. He knelt at her side and she blew softly in his ear as if testing a microphone. Then she whispered four senseless syllables into it which he would never forget. He felt himself blush.
“An obscenity?” Paula suggested.
“My mantra,” Judith Glazer said. “There. I feel better. Only Cornell and my guru know. I can give it away because I don’t need it anymore. You, Sam. I just gave away my three-thousand-dollar mantra to Cornell.” She smiled and Cornell felt something like affection for the nutty lady. “I’m dying,” she said jovially, “and going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam. Only I may look down on Sam, you know. I earned the privilege by living with him, earned it at discount, the odor of his odd-lot, uncut, 35mm film on my breasts when he came to me from the darkroom where he cut and rolled it onto used cartridges, the cutting and winding done at midnight in closets so that we didn’t have the expense of even that single low-watt dim red bulb. I’m going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam, on his thick soft bundles of hair,
Sam’s plateaus of head like actual geography, and let him know if he’s fucking up as dean. That’s our news. Sam’s to be appointed dean when Adrian steps down at the end of the semester.”
“Under the circumstances,” Paula said, “I’m not certain congratulations are entirely in order.”
“Oh yes,” Judith said, “of course they are. I’m going to Heaven and Sam’s going to the Administration Building.”
She seemed actually gay, her jaundice a kind of radiance. She was gay, even her crazy close-order drill less irritating than it could have been. There was a sort of warmth and comradeship in their edgy intimacy. There was a kind of truth in truth, Cornell thought. “How do you know you’re going to Heaven?” he asked.
“My rector thinks so, all the church ladies do. Besides,” she said, “the Bible tells me so.” She grinned. “Well,” she said, “if you can’t put your friends through it, what good are they anyway? I’ve put you people through it this afternoon. You’re good sports. Once in a while you weren’t even humoring me. You deserve a reward.”
“I couldn’t touch another malted,” Messenger said.
“No,” she said, “no more malteds. You know,” she said, “these are still the good times. No one’s ever paid this much attention to me. Not even when I was mad. But now, in the springtime of my death, when the pain is still manageable and discomfort’s only the mildest death duty, easily paid, easily confused with convalescence even; now, when my weight is down and I look as I used to as a girl, better really, for I was crazed then and had on me the stretch marks of my terror, now it’s all easy and there are hold buttons on my telephones and people bring us their covered chafing dishes and best recipes all made up and ready to go like take-out or room service and there’s nothing to do but visit with my girls when they come in all tan from the club, scrubbed as princesses, and I’ve time and inclination to answer all their questions, posing others that they dare not ask, stuffing them like French geese with hope and love, it’s not so bad.
George Mills Page 10
