Ending

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Blood rushed through the dusty chambers of my heart. “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m only telling the truth,” he said.

  My hand squeezed the handle of the door and pulled. “I have to go now.”

  “Don’t forget,” he said.

  In the elevator, climbing to Jay’s floor, I wondered what he meant, what it was he wanted me to remember. Then I was there again in that familiar place, with my heels clicking a cadence as I walked toward Jay’s room. Practicing in my head the smile that I would use and the way my eyes would look and the words hello hello hello darling hello. With the click-click of my heels I went past the other rooms and they looked out at me with a dull lack of interest, while I thought hello hello hello …

  Then I was in the room and he was not the same. Would never be the same. So yellow, so thin in just a few days. His ears were large, larger than I remembered them, as if they had grown to accommodate all the sounds he would have to gather and hoard for all time.

  “Hello, darling.” My voice. “Hello, Martin.” How odd that we remember language and the proper words for all occasions. There was no end to my words. I told Jay about Atlantic City and he laughed because I made him think that it was funny. I told him about the funny fat woman on the bus and the nutty woman at the hotel and the man’s suitcase in the bus station. I clowned and rolled my eyes. I imitated everyone’s voice and I was surprised at my uncanny knack for doing it.

  Martin giggled and said that I should have taken pictures. He had never been to the beach in the winter. It was one of the things he was going to do.

  I saw that Jay squinted now, as if he were trying to remember something, and that his hand went again and again to his back.

  “Legerdemain, sonny. That’s big for magic. Oh God.” I wiped my eyes with a tissue.

  Jay said, “I wish I had been there with you,” and I stopped laughing and looked hard and mercilessly into his eyes. That was the first step.

  Then Martin’s parents came to visit and they brought his grandmother, who was dramatically old and tiny. “Look who’s here,” his father said in that harsh voice, and he propelled the old woman toward the chair next to Martin’s bed.

  Martin was embarrassed and pleased at the same time. He kissed his grandmother’s cheek and I imagined the thin papery taste. She could hardly be heard, her voice now worn away to the whining thread of sound on an ancient phonograph record.

  Martin’s father spoke for her. “Grandma came all the way from the Bronx,” he announced.

  Her head, her hand, moved in spastic leaps.

  And then we all spoke in loud voices. “Isn’t that wonderful?” “Isn’t she something?”

  But I saw that Martin’s mother was looking speculatively at Jay and that she observed the changes in him that I observed. Her mouth closed in a narrow white line over her teeth.

  I moved closer to Jay in a defensive gesture and I kept my eyes on the incredible labyrinth of lines and wrinkles on the old woman’s face. To grow to such a great age, to stay past function and past ecstasy.

  Then Jay took some pictures of her and she leaned forward and removed her spectacles in a final gesture of vanity. In a little while the soft bell rang for the dismissal of visitors. Martin’s father lifted his mother from the chair.

  “Jay,” I said, in a voice that boomed in my own ears, “I love you. Good night, darling.”

  Even the old woman turned her head at the doorway and looked back.

  23

  WHEN NO ONE ELSE could do it, Mr. Caspar agreed to baby-sit in the evening. “The magic man is here,” Paul announced, and a real smile opened on Mr. Caspar’s face. Our apartment faces the front of the building and his the rear, where the view is of a courtyard and another identical building. I imagined that he would wait later in the dark of my living room, looking through the window for Estrella’s return from her night prowl.

  I went on my known path to the hospital and discovered that the nursing staff was nervous and expectant. Jerry Mann, the star of the television show for which Jay had been a cameraman, was on his way up. Word had already come from the lobby and there were whispers of excitement and heads poking through doorways all along the floor.

  “Jerry’s coming,” I told Jay.

  Martin’s parents, hearing the news, paced restlessly in the room. “Him?” rasped Martin’s father. “He’s terrific. We always watch him. Don’t we always watch him?” He turned to his wife for confirmation.

  She nodded. “Do you have your camera ready, Martin?”

  Martin’s father murmured, as if to himself, “We’ve watched him for years.”

  Then the noise of activity grew in the hall, with a few hushing sounds, useless, perfunctory. We heard footsteps and then Jerry was there, big as life, in the doorway. Martin’s father seemed stunned for a moment. Did Jerry look so different out of the magic box? Of course. He was human now, with real skin color and pores. He had new dimension and a voice that didn’t sound familiar as it adjusted to a pitch and tone appropriate to that room. His wife was behind him and it seemed that she would save the day because she was exotic beyond belief: furred, bejeweled, theatrical. Her voice was some sort of nasal music, touched with a foreign Quality I could not place. In the open doorway, faces appeared: awed, happy, some topped by peaked nurses’ caps. An elderly patient released her hold on a walker for one treacherous moment, clutched her bathrobe to her throat with one hand and waved with the other. From the corridor, “It’s him! Yes, yes, it’s him!”

  Finally, happy to be useful, Martin’s father smiled triumphantly and went to the door and shut it. When we were enclosed in that room, Jerry posed for Martin’s camera, with his wife, with Martin’s parents. The mother protested for a while, primping her hair, shredding a tissue, and then turned and spoke the very moment the shutter was opened.

  Jerry called Jay “Boy.” “How are you, Boy?” “We all miss you, Boy.” He wasn’t a bad actor. He waited for Jay to answer, kept his own expression constant. Would he call me “Girl”? But he didn’t. I had met him a few times, with this wife, and the wife before this one, at studio parties, and he remembered my name.

  “I watch you all the time,” Martin’s father said. His voice seemed to startle Jerry’s wife, who blinked at him. Jerry gave autographs. For want of something else, he scribbled on a piece of paper that stated THIS PATIENT IS NOT TO BE FED ANY SOLIDS THIS MORNING. He wrote Yours faithfully, Jerry Mann, in big impressive script. His wife’s perfume and the fragrance of their fame seemed extraordinary in that clinical room. With the door closed he became restless, and looked toward it with furtive but longing glances. The news of the studio ran out quickly. So-and-so is in Spain, is getting married, divorced, transferred. We sat in a dead, nervous silence that forced us to observe everything in the room: the beds, the coiling equipment, the bed charts that listed everything, even the maiden name of each patient’s mother. Into the silence Martin’s father cleared his throat with a sound of tire chains trying to grip an icy road. Then a few of us spoke at once. “Mr. Mann …” began Martin. “Well, I …” said his mother.

  We laughed and then Jerry told a funny story made even better by its intimate references to famous people. Martin’s father laughed and sputtered and choked and his wife had to slap his back. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “He loves you on the TV too.”

  We could hear the visitors’ bell chiming in the hall. “Five minutes,” called the nurse. “Five minutes.”

  Jerry stood up first. His hand came out and grasped Jay’s. “Okay, Boy. You have to get well now. They’re shooting my bad nostril. You hear?” He was perspiring and his face was pale. His wife arranged her fur around her shoulders and he looked at her with an urgent expression.

  “Good night, all,” she piped through her nose.

  Jay thanked them for coming. Jerry kissed me and his flesh was damp and chilled. “Do you need a ride?” I shook my head and he said, “Take care,” and grasping his wife’s elbow, he steered her toward
the door, as Martin’s father rushed to reopen it. Good-bye Good-bye. They waved to him and called after him as if he were leaving on a long voyage and would not be seen again on the same channel at the same time on the very next night.

  I had become terribly aware of the car now as something large and hulking and patient waiting for me in the parking lot of the hospital. The vehicle that took me to Jay, that took me home again. I could hear the sound of its engine in traffic with the talent of a new mother who hears her own baby in the chorus of squalls from the nursery. It was a particular car, ours, with scars and odors and idiosyncrasies that humanized it.

  Old friend, I thought, as I closed the door, encapsulated against the night. But then, riding home, I stopped for a traffic light on a street as empty and still as a Sunday street in a Hopper painting, and the engine moaned and coughed and was silent. A small red warning light on the dashboard glowed and went out. The radio stopped, and the heater. I waited, half expecting that the car would begin again of its own accord. Then I shifted to neutral and pressed the gas pedal tentatively. Silence. This time I pressed more urgently, pumping my foot, thinking vague thoughts about flooding the engine, remembering words like carburetor and points and spark plugs, words heard from the passenger seat as Jay and a mechanic stood and talked in sunlight, patting the hood from time to time as if it were the flank of a beloved horse. I was not even sure if I could lift the hood (was there some intricate catch?) and would I know simply by looking if something had disconnected or burned or worn away? I stepped out into the starry winter night and looked at the car, hunched and quiet, containing its mysteries. I kicked at a tire and rapped my knuckles on the roof.

  There were a few stores on the street, serving the immediate neighborhood, and they were closed and dark. There were several houses, but only three had lights visible behind the drawn shades. I would have to knock on one of the doors and explain what had happened. I would ask to use the telephone to call for service on the car, and a taxi to take me home. Yet I didn’t, stopped somehow by the idea of disturbing the privacy of those homes, where families were involved in the simple and yet complex business of their lives. Taking baths or reading the newspaper, eating leftovers with their fingers from plastic containers in the refrigerator. I imagined children doing homework in kitchen light and someone laying out the cards for a game of solitaire.

  In the distance I could hear the motors of other cars. Perhaps someone would drive down that particular street and see me, and offer to help. “Help,” I said softly, and the word dissolved in the air with the vapor of my breath.

  What if someone dangerous came along? Boys, for instance, who would seem very nice at first, even deferential. Boys with pretty faces and cold leather jackets. “Can we help you, Ma’am?” Then slowly, in some tribal dance, they would surround me, chanting something in the new language of the streets. I wouldn’t know that I was threatened, even laughing at first—“Say, what’s going on?” Then knowing that it was hopeless, hearing the end of things in the soft thud of blows to the head, in the sounds of flesh tearing in the name of sex. “Help, help,” only whispered now, and the terrible clots of blood, tasting strangely like tears in the throat, and darkness and darkness and a new silence.

  But it might be Francis, in his blue station wagon with empty cookie boxes on the seat, and a child’s shoe beneath it. Francis, shutting the motor off and opening the door like an invitation. “Well come on. Get in. Isn’t it lucky I just happened to be riding down this street? I’ve been thinking about you and your destiny and your loneliness and your husband and the soft pink nipples under that brown sweater. Now just get in and I’ll take you home or somewhere without lamplight and I’ll give you what you really need, never mind that metaphysical crap of spiritual love and loss. What you need, baby …”

  Click, click, I would start to run along the street. His engine starting again with an explosive snort and the car alongside me with the door still swinging open.

  “Get in.”

  Me running in the slow-motion leaps and bounds of a dreamer.

  “You whore. You teasing bitch.” The car, pacing me, a manager cruising alongside his panting fighter. “Are you getting in?”

  But I would be exhilarated from running, from the transfusion of air, and I would begin to laugh, puffing and laughing at once, and the door of the car would bang shut and I would be left there, laughing and gasping in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  But I sober up fast, walk sedately now, because there is a vintage car, rounded and high, coming down the street. My father toots the horn at me, a playful honk (the way he honks at all the girls—no harm in it). My mother is sitting beside him and they are slimmer and very young with no ideas in their heads of ever growing older. My father toots a tune on the car’s horn: shave and a haircut—two bits! That’s appropriate. My mother slaps his arm and leans out the window. “Come home now, tootsie. It’s time for dinner and I’ll make something good with steam rising from it and the smell of butter and you can have your old room again and be our pride and joy.”

  I stop and look inside that car, at the plaid seat covers and the dark polished gleam of my father’s hair. I don’t know if I want to go inside again, to go back and back and back. In a way it seems more terrifying than going ahead.

  Then I don’t have to decide because another car is coming and the driver is Jay, and I think, thank God that everything is all right now, that all the horrors are only the dream and all the pleasures are the reality. Because Jay is ruddy and almost round-faced, and his hand is on the steering wheel and he’s laughing. He’s waiting for me, full of new seed and beauty, and tears come to my eyes because I’m so happy.

  “Guess what, I had the most terrible dream. I can’t shake it and the essence lingers, but I can see that you’re all right and even immortal and we can go home together with your hand resting between my legs and I’ll keep touching you and looking at you because I can’t shake off this dream. It seemed so real, but I can’t tell you the details, they’re too painful. Well, all right, Jay. You were sick, oh, I won’t even use that word, you know what everybody fears, and it was such a long dream, made up of all the years of my life, it seemed. It was so real, with blood and bad smells and death rubbing its hands together like something in a monster movie. Jay, I’m so happy, I’m so happy.”

  I began to weep, looking into the window of a shoe repair shop at a pair of nylon lifts for ladies’ shoes. I tried to read all the signs: While U Wait, Professional Work, We Fill Orthopedic Prescriptions. But then my head filled with Jay, and I cried and cried, the only sound on that quiet street.

  Then a car came along, scanning the road with its headlights. It slowed as it drew alongside me and the window was rolled down. A woman said, “What’s the matter, are you broken down?”

  I blew my nose and wiped my eyes before I walked closer. “Yes. I didn’t know what to do. I was just getting up the nerve to ask someone if I could use a telephone.”

  There were several people in the car. The driver, a fat man with a tuxedo on under his overcoat, came out and lifted the hood of my car. “Battery?” he asked. I shrugged and he said, “Did she go on you suddenlike, or flicker out slow?”

  “Suddenly.” Thinking, mercilessly, without friendship or loyalty.

  “Got service?”

  I nodded again.

  He clucked, felt around under the hood, muttered. “Might be the hose here.” Then he closed the hood with a decisive slam. “Okay, we’ll leave a flare out here and take you someplace to make a call. Then we can drive you home.”

  I told him that I didn’t live too far away, that I would call from home and just leave the key under the floor mat.

  The car was so crowded that I hesitated, but a chorus of voices urged me in. “Come on. There’s always room for one more.” “Ooooh, you must be freezing!” “Move over, Roseanne. Vincent, sit on Auntie Grace.” There was a great shifting and rearranging and suddenly a space opened for me in the back seat. There was a pow
erful odor of flowers in the car.

  “Do you smell the flowers?” asked the woman in the front seat. She held up an overflowing basket. “We’re just now coming from my niece’s wedding reception. What a time we had. Wasn’t it terrific, Vinnie?” she asked the driver, who had come back into the car again.

  “Some party,” he agreed.

  “This is my husband,” the woman said. “These two are my kids. That’s my sister-in-law back there with you, and her husband. This is my aunt.”

  “How do you do?” I said, and the children looked at me shyly and giggled.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” the sister-in-law said. “I ate myself sick. Such food. You should have seen the Viennese table. It’s almost a sin.” She sighed happily.

  “We’ll all see it on your waistline,” her husband said, and she jabbed absently at the side of his head. “Look who’s talking.”

  It was warm inside the car. All that body heat, all that easy conversation. Life seemed so reasonable again, so sane.

  “What a bride,” the old aunt said, in a deep voice. “She was like a movie star. The groom was very good-looking. Tall, long hair like the kids wear.”

  “A sexy kid,” said the woman in the front seat “They really were a sexy couple.”

  The old aunt laughed. “Today everything is sex.”

  I laughed too, shutting my eyes.

  “The bridesmaids wore pink, old-fashioned with big hats, you know, and roses. The color scheme was pink and white. Pink tablecloths, pink and white striped candles.”

  “The way they do things today,” the aunt said.

  Their voices droned on and on all the way home and I became a part of it, the lighthearted banter, the leftover joy. Then we came to my apartment house. I thanked them all. They shifted in their seats to shake hands and to wave good-bye. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. Then I opened the door and was expelled into the world again.

  I looked up at the window of our apartment and I thought that I saw a shadow move slowly behind the curtains. Caspar on his night watch. But when I went upstairs and opened the door, I found him sitting at the kitchen table, contemplating his hands. “Hello,” I called out. “I’m home.”