Messenger felt he was clearly second string, a man who had been granted tenure by his university when he was still in his mid-thirties, on the basis, it seems, of that same New Yorker story that had gotten him laid a dozen or so years before, the memory of which incident kept him returning to those campuses neither for his token fees nor for those sparse audiences to whom he read from what even he could not seriously think of as his “work,” and still less for his friends, but for those parties.
Then, at a time of his life when he no longer really needed it, he came into an inheritance, or an inheritance by default. An aunt, preceded in death by her maiden daughters, left him three hundred thousand dollars. On two occasions he had himself almost died, once from a heart attack and once from a bone stuck in his throat on which he had nearly choked. And he was troubled by his children.
And something else. He had grown tolerant of his own bad driving. Regularly he dinged cars in parking lots, gouging metal divots from his once smooth fenders and altering the face of his grille, the delicate crosshatching piecemeal collapsing as he sought to negotiate parking spaces at four and five and six miles an hour. There was one car, a black ’76 Gremlin, that, parked by the curb in the narrow faculty lot behind his building, seemed always to be in his way, the dark molding about its left rear wheel an obstacle he seldom missed as he attempted to move into his slot in the single cramped row of cars. Each accident, each small engagement, brought a brief anger, then a queer, righteous, irrational fulfillment. The car was never not there, always, it seemed to Messenger, in a favored position among the automobiles lined up like race horses at a starting gate. Messenger cursed its owner’s regularity, the long-suffering smugness of the scarred and battered Gremlin. He never left a note—when he left in the afternoon the car was still there—or sought to hide the evidence of his guilt, the injured auto’s black paint smeared like spoor across his cream-colored Pontiac. On each occasion he made the same speech to himself. “My hand-eye coordination’s. going. Fuck him. Why should I worry about a little scratched paint?” But he knew he would neither die nor ever hurt anybody in an accident, that he would simply drive over curbs as he turned corners, skin cars parked along side streets, dent the odd fender here and there along life’s highway.
He was forty-five years old, an old middle-aged man, and required marijuana whenever he left his home.
“Meals-on-Wheels,” Messenger called as he pushed open the unlocked door.
“That’s all right,” a voice called thinly.
The house looked like the inside of a stringed instrument, the wood unpainted, gray as kindling. Even the furniture was unfinished. Messenger, looking at the warped woodwork and canted floors and walls, had the sense that the rooms needed to be tuned.
“Is it still hot?”
“Should be,” Messenger said, raising his voice to the woman he had not yet seen. “I could warm it up on your stove if you like.”
“Yeah,” the woman said, “that’d be terrific. A hot free lunch would make all the difference in my life.” She came out of her room. She was pushing an aluminum walker. “I’m Mrs. Carey,” Mrs. Carey said.
“Cornell Messenger.”
“Yeah,” she said, “how do you do? I missed you yesterday. I was to the clinic for tests. I didn’t know I’d be gone so long or I’d have left a note. Cigarette?”
“No thanks.” He had already begun to reheat the chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes.
“It was the first time I was out in over a month,” she said. “It felt real good. They picked me up in one of those minibuses they send round for the handicapped. They got them equipped with special lifts for wheelchairs. Welfare gave me a wheelchair but I swear to you it’s easier to get around with my walker. I ain’t got the strength in my arms to roll it. A woman needs somebody to push her. I’ll tell you something,” Mrs. Carey said. “I think it looks common when a lady pushes her own wheelchair. That sound funny? That’s the way of it. I’m a heavy smoker but even when I was walking I never smoked in the street. That looks common, too. You think it’s foolish a woman with a Welfare wheelchair and a free walker that travels the town in the handicap bus and waits on the warmed-over charity lunch should say such things and have such notions? You put me down for pride I sit in the kitchen in my nightgown and robe while some strange guy heats my meal?”
“No, of course not.”
“Ain’t you nice,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something you’re so nice. I qualify for benefits from seventeen agencies of the United Way. Last year it was only six. Next year, if I live and nothing happens, it could be thirty.”
“You should look on the bright side,” Cornell said.
“Yeah? You think so?”
“I certainly do.”
“How about that? Say, let me ask you something. Are you important? You told me on the blower you’re making Mrs. Glazer’s deliveries, and she’s married to a big shot over at the university. Maybe you’re important too.”
“No,” Cornell said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. What’s wrong with Mrs. Glazer anyway?”
“I guess she’s sick.”
“Mind my business, huh? Okay. Let me ask you something else. What did you do with that lunch you had left over yesterday?”
“I ate it.”
“No kidding? Yeah? Maybe you ain’t important.”
“Important people eat a different lunch?”
“They eat omelets. They eat salads. They eat cold soups and thin fish. Let me ask you a question. I don’t get out much anymore. Just to the clinic, just to the agencies. Mrs. Glazer used to tell me, but she ain’t been by in weeks now.”
“Mrs. Glazer has cancer,” Messenger said.
“Oh shit,” Mrs. Carey said.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Cornell said.
“No no, that’s all right. Can I call her up? Is she home?”
“Well she’s home,” Messenger said, “but she’s very tired. It might be better if you waited.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“She’s a friend of mine.”
“Geez, I almost put my foot in it, didn’t I? How about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, forget it,” Mrs. Carey said. “I didn’t know you was that Messenger.”
“That Messenger? What do you mean? What were you going to ask me?”
An odd change seemed to have overtaken her. She became suddenly coy, teasing, returned quite mysteriously to a time when she had not been ill, the new quality somehow unseemly, as if she powered her own wheelchair perhaps, or smoked in the street. She wanted coaxing, Messenger saw, but he was annoyed. “Ha ha,” she laughed, almost singing. “Ha ha ha.” It was as if she remembered not flirtation exactly but flirtation’s poses and noises. He hoped she wasn’t going to hold her knees and sway in place. “Ha ha,” she chirped again.
“I seem to have been a regular tonic for you,” Cornell said. Was she rolling her eyes at him? Was she pursing her lips? What was this teenage pantomime all about?
“Are you holding? Have you got any mary jane on you?”
“What?”
“Are you high? Do you see visions? They jump the rates on your car insurance?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ha ha.”
“Look, lady, dinner is served.”
“Maybe you ought to give me a puff. I hear it does wonders for chicken-fried steak.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not an agency of the United Way.”
“Ooh, you’re angry.” Cornell had started to leave the kitchen. “What I’d like to know is how you find the time to come down here when there’s so much to be done at home?”
“Nice meeting you.”
“I’m a goddamn shut-in, Mister. You think it’s a disappointment to me they give a marathon in the park I can’t run in it? It ain’t the long distances that get to you, honey, it’s the yards and inches. Time and tide took the world away. You think you
can buy me off with TV, radio call-in shows, fucking Action Line? My good friend got cancer and you lay down the house rules? She’s tired, it might be better if I waited? She ain’t taking calls from the lower classes just now? She’ll take mine though. Want to bet?”
“Hey, come on, what are you so excited about? Don’t get so excited.”
“How’s whoosis, Audrey? Does she still bust out crying when she reads the paper?”
“Look.”
“Can she get her own breakfast cereal yet? Or is she still too upset about the French Revolution? How’s her husband? Is he still going to commit her if she don’t shape up?”
“Judith had no right——”
“Oh, rights,” she said. “Rights ain’t in it, just needs. Like your pal, the one that’s in love. Losey. And what about his wife, the woman on whaddayoucallit, academic probation? How’s your kid?”
“What about my kid?”
“Well, we don’t know,” she said. “We ain’t sure.”
It was an exquisite situation and Messenger had to admire his dying pal and her still lively genius for humiliation. It was the wackiness, her locked-up years, all that time getting well when, denied the world and everything that was not therapy, everything not grist for her health, from Mrs. Carey’s omelets and cold soups—her digestion in those years (she’d been a long time loony, almost, she’d said, a lifer) a lesson in nutrition (he could imagine her sturdy, high-fibered boweling the consistency and color of Lincoln Logs)—to her family, the ordinary aunts and uncles (though by “ordinary” one did not mean anything bogtrot or rank-and-file: he had seen the men’s distinguished hair, their pewter sideburns, the women like seeded tennis players with their flat behinds and bellies and their hard, suntanned skin) and good-natured cousins—he’d seen them, too, and could not remember whether they were men or women: he supposed that what they had in common with each other and with Judith was not their character or sense of humor but only a frame of reference, the names of headmistresses and masters and coaches and ministers and cooks and servants, their generation itself, he guessed—and the brother almost old enough to be her father. Denied the parents themselves, those daughter-scorned victims who might, if they’d only been ministers or cooks, have gotten off, been dismissed as merely two more names in the lexicon. (And he’d seen them too, and come away impressed, even charmed, by that Chairman of the Board and his meticulously courteous wife, now dead, amazed and astonished as he always was by a wealth that seemed to have no immediate source or, what was even more astonishing, product, that did not burn gas or coal, or supply widgets, or grow food, or win or even just fight wars, or get rolled up and tossed onto your lawn each morning——that was simply, as far as Messenger could see, just pure wealth, pure money, withheld from the planet’s effects entirely, like the invisible original resources of a king or government.) Denied everything that could not induce health, hard news and strong books not permitted her, even, he’d heard, prime-time television, even make-up, even card or board games with the other patients in the common room. Allowed two things only: The first her psychiatrist (hers literally; they paid him seventy thousand dollars a year; he had no other patients), a stickler for every event of her mind who, if she had not already been mad, might have made her so with his endless inquiry—she was, it was said, his unpublished book——Judith: A Study of Causes—into her responses and reactions. And the other her lover, Sammy, the future husband and dean a simple graduate student in those days who may or may not also have been on retainer.
So that her talent for creative abuse, for industrial-strength practical jokes, must have dated from those days. Indeed, she had once said as much at a dinner party.
“When I was being fattened up back there on the farm, when they were getting me ready for the world, I wasn’t permitted drugs. I wasn’t even permitted sleeping pills. Hell, I wasn’t even permitted shock therapy. I can remember looking at the faces of some of the other patients on my wing when they came back from electric shock. They looked as if they had just been jabbed in the eyes with Novocaine. I envied them their dulled wits and hamstrung wills. A crazy is so helpless anyway. No one believes her. That’s the ultimate outrage anyway——that everyone’s always considering the source. I tell you if I had smelled smoke and yelled ‘Fire!’ not a nurse or orderly would have looked up. You had to do grand opera to get a response from those people. I wouldn’t do that. I became a sort of mad politician instead. I schemed constantly. We became pen pals.”
“Pen pals?”
“I wrote them letters. I reminded them of everything I knew about them, all I could think of that had just been jarred loose by the electric company, everything their doctors and the public utilities wanted burned out of them. It was one public service against another. They turned on the juice, I turned on the heat.”
“Did they ever answer?”
“You bet they did! Among all those get well cards and cheery letters from home, I venture to say mine was the only mail with any real news. They answered all right. They told me stuff about themselves their docs didn’t know.”
“Oh, Judy,” Sam said.
“Oh, Sam. What’s so terrible? We believed in trauma then, in dreams and childhood. In the raised voice at the vulnerable moment. It was a sort of astrology. The houses of Jupiter, the cusps of Mars. We believed in everything but character.——And I didn’t do anything with their letters. I didn’t use them for blackmail or flash them for gossip. I was interested in only one thing.”
“Judy, please.”
“Sam, please.——I was interested in only one thing. I was a kind of alchemist. All I cared about was the transubstantiation of dross into mischief.”
The cunt, Messenger thought, and knew something he hadn’t known he’d known. She’d made Sam dean. He didn’t know how, but he couldn’t recall either which were girl cousins, which boy, or where the money came from or if it even was money at the bottom of the family fortune. It could have been anything. It could have been God’s good will. Sam was Judy’s man. Judy was Sam’s friend downtown. He was her dean, her mischief.
And it was still an exquisite situation. Judy was dying, he couldn’t lay a glove on her. Judy was dying, she held all the cards. She was a hell of a foe. She was a hell of a foe with her scorched-earth policies and land mines and booby traps and all the rest of her devastating paraphernalia and time bomb vengeance.
That she had planned this he had no doubt. That she had known who her victims would be was another question. (Excepting the immediate family of course——Sam, the girls, possibly her father.) Was he meant to be a victim? Messenger thought so. “If there’s anything I can do,” he had said. It was what everyone said. Surely he had been saved for the Meals-on-Wheels route. But how could she have known his schedule that semester, that he was conveniently free just those two to two and a half hours she would need him? How could she have known Mrs. Carey would be so cooperative, blurt out the names and disgraces of his friends, accuse Cornell of his habit, and hint at inside information about his children? How, finally, could she have known she would get cancer?
But that was the point, wasn’t it? She couldn’t. Judith made mischief the way some people made money. Not to buy anything with it, just to have it ready to hand. If she was a vague irritant to them while she was alive, how much more of a pain in the ass would she be when she died and there was no stopping her? Who else in the city knew of the griefs in the west county? Messenger saw these now as Mrs. Carey must have seen them——distanced by soap opera, attenuated in a medium of insulate otherness, flattened by the fact that they were not shared in any real way. Judith’s achievement had been to trivialize what was most important to them, what kept them going and made them friends.
He would not eat the next leftover lunch. He would bring it to Judy.
2
No one has called him Captain in years. He’s Mr. Mead now. He would be Mr. Mead to anyone. To a president, to an enemy or friend, to the public health nurses who have the most
intimate knowledge of what remains to Mr. Mead of Mr. Mead’s body. To God Himself perhaps. It seems strange to him, and a little impertinent—for great age alters relation as well as vocabulary—that Louise should call him Dad. He can be no one’s dad.
Because you outlive everything if you live long enough.
What changes he has seen!
And has outlived change too, the years, even the epochs of his own life, no longer discrete to him, or that things done one way were now done—if they were done—another, of the least importance. He is too old to be an old-timer, too old for that county courthouse ease where soul takes tea with soul or cronies swap cronies not viewpoint, opinion—they can’t hold their bowels, how can they hold opinions?—but simple, loquacious mood, up there, static, displayed as artifact, veteran’d whether or no they have ever been to war, even the benches on which they sit become a sort of reviewing stand. He is too old to be a grandfather, too old to fish, whittle, lie, too old even to be marked by a distinct disease. That those nurses know him so well, and know so well what can be expected of him, has nothing to do with his being Mr. Mead. (There is a chart at the foot of his bed even though he is home and not in a hospital. Nothing is written on it except his name—Mr. Mead—not his pulse or blood pressure reading or temperature, no note about diet or medications——possibly his age.) They know him so well because he’s a category, not a person. As an infant is a category. Finally, he is too old even to be Mr. Mead.
He tries to follow what his daughter and that fellow George, his son-in-law, are saying. It isn’t really difficult if he concentrates. He recognizes the names even without the elaborate reference points and documentation his daughter insists on supplying each time her narrative turns a corner or comes to one. He has been a sailor. It isn’t difficult to orient himself.
“You remember, Dad. He used to have that TV show on Sunday mornings where he healed people of their sicknesses. Well, he’s minister at Virginia Avenue Baptist now. That big old church that used to be Catholic? You remember. It was just over from Crown’s? You used to take us to Crown’s and treat us to ice cream when you came back from a trip. That time George got his Buick we went there. You, Mom, George and me——all of us. We had to park three blocks away because mass was still going on, and you told us about that river pilot who’d put into shore on Sunday mornings just to find a mass he could go to.”
George Mills Page 26
