Ending

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He said my name in a hoarse whisper and then his hand moved, wandering down, down into darkness. “Leonard,” he whispered, giving me his name to make intimacy seem reasonable and decent

  Here I go, I thought, and my hand found him and he grew out of grasp. With a last fleeting thought of, oh, this bed, I lay back and drew him in.

  Later, when I woke, the room was in half-light. I woke him too, so that he would be gone before the children were up. Done and done and done.

  36

  JAY SLEPT SO MUCH that I became used to it, to the long bedside vigils where I would sit drooped in thought, or nonthought, suffering instant lapses of memory. What day was it? What time? What had I been thinking only a few minutes before?

  But then there were times when he came sharply and suddenly awake, emerging from one of those long and enervating dreams. He would continue conversations begun in the dream, fix me with his eyes, and demand a response. He was there again, but he was not quite himself. Drugged, drained, pummeled into hopelessness. It scared me because I never knew what to expect, and I was ashamed, because this was the only contact possible, the only thing left between us, and I wanted to avoid it.

  “The policies,” he began one day while his eyes were still closed.

  I was startled out of my slouch. “Sweetheart,” I said. “We talked about that. Don’t you remember? I spoke to Murray. We took care of everything.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It comes back. Do they call?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody. The crew. Murray. Jerry.”

  “Yes yes, they all do.” Sick with guilt, I knew that I wanted him to sleep again. He had interrupted that strange new state of nothingness I had been clever enough to discover, and he was leading me back to reality. If we talked anymore it would become painful, real, catastrophic. “Do you want some water, darling?” That was a safe topic—the diminishing needs of a diminishing man.

  But he didn’t even bother to answer. “There are things you have to do, Sandy,” he said.

  “What things?”

  “Take care of some of my stuff. You could sell some of the equipment, the cameras.”

  “I gave the Rolleiflex to Martin. You told me,” I said, worried that he had forgotten and would feel betrayed.

  But he only nodded, shutting his eyes again.

  Just sleep, I thought. Sweet nothing sleep. I could do it myself right now if there was some place to lie down.

  “I keep thinking about the book,” Jay said.

  The book I felt an instant throb of jealousy. Why did he think about that? Why didn’t he think about the children, about me? But I recognised my own lack of fairness and reason. After all the book was an extension of himself. When he was gone the book would be the real and final proof of himself. As far back as I could remember it was the thing he most looked forward to. Not to its completion, perhaps, but to its growth, to the very act of doing it.

  “I wish I could have finished it,” he said, and he might have been talking about anything, even his own life.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I took my own sweet time.”

  “There’s a lot there,” I said. “You did a lot.”

  He sighed. “Would you look through it for me, Sandy? Would you see if you can get it into any order, make some sense of it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can do that. I have anyway. I do.”

  “What?”

  “Look through it sometimes when I go home.” I felt shy, embarrassed, as if I had been discovered in some naive and romantic practice.

  “Maybe you can show it to somebody someday,” he said.

  “You mean try and get it published, Jay? Is that what you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, trying to force some excitement into the monotone of my voice. “It’s a beautiful book, Jay. I’m going to do it this week. Look through the folder, get things going for you.”

  “It wouldn’t have much of a chance,” he said. “It needs work.”

  “Who knows? Listen, what do you want to call it? Something simple and right to the point, I think. New York, a Photographic Essay. Or New York City, A Life Story. Is that corny? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned his head away, as if he were bored, weary of the subject.

  But I felt compelled to continue, desperately chatty, like a woman being eased out of a love affair. I said positive things, things that implied the future. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t stop.

  “Ah, who gives a damn,” he said then, into the wall. “Who gives a fucking damn about anything.”

  And I found myself sinking back into the chair, the new false energy instantly spent. He was right. Who gives a damn. Who cares. “Darling,” I said. “Do you think you can sleep? Will you try to sleep?”

  His voice came with a muffled resonance, his face still turned away. “I’m not tired,” he said, and fell instantly asleep.

  37

  IN THE SMALL SOLARIUM at the end of the corridor, relatives and friends of the terminal patients retreated during the day and night when they were relieved of their deathwatch. After a few days, faces became familiar, and particular habits, expected. A woman in a gray coat never removed it, as if she were incurably cold in that overheated room, or as if she would be called any moment for an urgent errand outdoors. She indulged in a series of tics in compulsive order. First she would crack her knuckles one at a time, the left hand first, always. Then she would stretch, turning her head from side to side, releasing more crackling sounds into that silence. Then finally, she would clear her throat with a noise so desperate that everyone would look up at once. For days she spoke to no one, tented in her overcoat, while her husband, who had been an orthodontist somewhere in Queens, died of cancer.

  Another woman was more verbal. Her mother was dying of what seemed to be all the complications of old age. The daughter took her seat in the solarium with an introductory sigh that invited conversation. Her hair was always set in rollers and clips, only slightly obscured by a green print scarf. She brought food with her in tiny brown bags, and when she was not speaking she rattled and rummaged inside the bags for her sandwiches and cookies. “Would you like one?” she always asked. “Would you like one? Would you? It’s tuna.”

  After two days the woman in the gray coat would not even answer her and the woman in the curlers drew up one side of her mouth in a significant expression.

  Two men, obviously brothers, sometimes held hands while they waited news of their father. Their wives, who visited only occasionally, didn’t like one another, and spoke in affected voices.

  The first week after Jay had been brought to that floor, an old man died in the room across from his. His children decided at the last minute to bring their senile mother from a nursing home nearby, so that the parents might see each other one more time. But by the time they arrived, the old man had already entered a coma and could not respond to anyone. The old woman came out of the elevator and made a great deal of noise. Perhaps she was deaf, or excited, or simply frightened. But her voice seemed to pierce the brain. “What’s the matter, now?” she shrieked. “Oh, my legs!” The middle-aged children, each supporting her under one arm, looked at each other doubtfully. But they couldn’t retreat now. They were there. The old couple were within a few feet of each other. Their mother and their father.

  “Mama!” the old woman shouted. “They drag me on these feet!”

  A nurse rushed from her station, saying, “Shhhh, you’ll have to keep her quiet.”

  The old woman looked at her fiercely, her chin trembling, but she was still for a few minutes. When they came to the father’s room, she shrugged off the supporting hands of her children and walked to the bedside. The old man was propped on his bed, almost sitting, the center of some strange universe where all tubes led to him and entered him everywhere. He was the color of dying old men, and he made rasping noises deep in his throat, that noise
of failing machines. Before she could be stopped, the old woman grasped him by the front of his nightgown, half pulling him up from the bed, so that his long white hair fell back in pale threads. “Morris!” she yelled. “Pull yourself together!”

  By the time the children reached her, she had dislodged the tubes from his nostrils and knocked his head a few times against the bars of the headboard. “Mama!” They looked at each other accusingly. The reunion had not been such a good idea after all. She didn’t know how to say a proper goodbye.

  As the elevator door opened, she said, “Morris, I’m walking on fire!” and was heard from no more. The husband lived two more days.

  Jay, I thought, pull yourself together. Enough, enough.

  He woke, asked, “It is Monday?” Slept.

  Who says a proper good-bye after all? How? To his eyes, to his tender sac, to his white feet, to his hands.

  The nurses came to do things, mysterious rituals of sheet-changing and sponging. Down the hall again to the solarium. The woman in curlers ate a meat loaf sandwich, picking crumbs off her skirt with fastidious fingers, and dropping them back into the brown bag. The odor was the odor of school cafeterias, the sound of her chewing the only thing to be heard anywhere.

  Izzy came in her moleskin coat, brought little wrapped mints, a pocket pack of Kleenex, change for the telephone. When my throat became too dry, or thick with sorrow, I would suck one of the mints, sometimes forgetting and splintering it with my teeth. Then all day when I sighed or drew deep breaths, I felt a winter wind rush in and burn the back of my throat.

  The two brothers came in, nodded at me, at Izzy, and took their places. The woman with the curlers ate Yankee Doodles. She licked the white cream from the wrappers.

  Izzy put her arm through mine. “Who’s with your kids?” I asked.

  “Eddie,” she said.

  I raised my eyebrows. It was Saturday.

  “He’s their father, you know. He’s taking them to the Aquarium. Ah,” she said, looking around her, inhaling the atmosphere, “how can you stand it?”

  I opened one of the mints and put it into my mouth. “I can’t.” Tears came to my eyes.

  “Oh Sandy.” She pulled at her fingers as if they might come off.

  The two brothers stood up and went out toward their father’s room.

  Izzy leaned closer and touched my shoulder. “Sandy, listen,” she said, in an urgent whisper. “Do you know about Eddie and me?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, sometimes he stays.”

  I stared at her and the melting mint slid down my throat.

  “For part of the night, I mean.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, but she was afraid that I hadn’t understood. “You know, I still sleep with him. Once in a while.”

  “Izzy,” I said. “This isn’t a church.”

  “I know. I just wanted to tell someone. I’ll bet you think I’m a damn fool. Or worse.”

  I shook my head again.

  “Oh, what’s the difference?” she asked. “You look around here and you realize it doesn’t matter what you do. Or if you last long enough, it won’t matter.” She looked at me anxiously, and I realized that she was waiting for some word of comfort or approval.

  “Of course,” I said.

  The woman in curlers came over and offered something from her bag. “My mother has a heart of iron,” she said, and I knew with a terrible certainty when she would comb her hair out.

  38

  MY NIGHT RITUAL WOULDN’T work anymore. It was strange and frightening, as if there can be an expiration date on experience. Or maybe it was all in the natural order of things. Jay was dying and so was everything that had existed between us.

  Sleep should be easier, I thought, as simple as all the other body functions. But it wasn’t. I used to sleep quickly and well after lovemaking. Then talk was an effort, a valiant attempt at continued companionship. Our heads were as heavy as those of children kept up past their bedtime.

  Jay was the bearer of water and oranges, the one to check windows and door locks. I’d watch him in his rounds through half-lidded eyes, feeling thirsty, and sleepy, and warm. I lay across the bed, into his territory, still looking for warm places his body had left. Still trying to fit us together, our shadows and our thoughts. Jay came back to bed bearing two brimming glasses of water, an absurd and naked waiter. His hair even darker with dampness, his chest hair flattened, his penis still half-erect, as if in fond memory. “You have a lovely, lovely body,” I once said.

  “We aim to please, missus,” he answered and the water sloshed over the sides of the glasses. I could hardly stay awake long enough to drink it. Ah, sweet and natural sleep.

  I tried to bring that back now, tried to conjure up the past again, willing to take whatever came along, the good moments or the bad. But nothing came at all. There is no life after death, I was convinced of that. But the life before it should be a more tangible and solid thing.

  I kept the light on in the room the way I did when I was a child, but now it was a seduction. I wanted ghosts to enter. When I slept finally I always came awake abruptly, as if someone shook me, and then it was to that strange mixture of natural and artificial light. I tried to bring back the lovemaking, or the quarrels, or even ordinary domestic moments, but nothing held. There were other people awake in the building. Lumber creaked, plumbing complained, and the real world intruded. Maybe I had outgrown the need for sleep. There was a hot dry energy I had never known before. But I couldn’t apply it to anything. Books refused to be read, food became inedible, and simple television programs couldn’t be followed, as if language itself had become obsolete. I walked back and forth in the bedroom saying, I have to think, I have to think.

  I opened the drawer of the night table. Next to my diaphragm, to old check stubs and some loose pennies, was the vial of sleeping capsules. I took one and held it up to the bed lamp, trying to see through it. But its redness was as dense and mysterious as sleep itself. I could just take it and be done with it. It would be like a swift and painless blow to the head. But I hesitated. It would be the end of something that I dreaded to give up. The end of my control over things, that was one part. The end of memory as fantasy, of Jay entering this room through the magic of my will. His voice and his presence. It was a leave-taking in a way, a rehearsal for the real thing. Good-bye. Good-bye then, I thought, weary and sick with the knowledge.

  I put the capsule on the back of my tongue and forced it down my throat without water. I gagged slightly and then it was gone. I climbed back into bed again, half sitting against both pillows, waiting for its journey and mine to begin.

  39

  “SANDY?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Sandy?”

  “I’m here, Jay, I’m right here.”

  “Okay. I was dreaming.” He smiles, sleeps, frowns. Dogs bark, phones ring. “If it’s for me …”

  “Shhhh. It’s nothing.”

  In the dream he drives a car, hands up to steer, foot braced against the sheet. He stops short, bed creaks.

  “Don’t, Jay. It’s nothing.” Not wanting to touch him now. Those greenstick bones. What can we do to put flesh on those bones? Dem bones.

  “Who’s there? Who came in?”

  “No one. It’s only me.” The machinery of my brain. The hurricane of my breath.

  “I keep dreaming.”

  “I know.”

  “Did the baby cry?”

  “No. It was in your dream.”

  The good nurse comes, leans over with her cloud of dark hair, mother hair. Brings a cup of tea. The cup rattles in the saucer.

  I carry it out to the solarium, where daylight is dazzling. Why do we die in dark places?

  The woman in the gray coat is inconsolable. “I am inconsolable,” she says, and cracks her knuckles. The report is as sharp as the noise from a fired gun.

  My mother comes on tiptoe, her shoes squeaking. She grimaces in agony at their noise. “Lie down,
tootsie.”

  “I can’t. Lying down, I sink, I drown.”

  The woman in the gray coat stretches and sighs. The sound is deafening.

  We walk back to the room. Thundering hooves.

  Jay is lying on his side with his back to the door. His hospital gown is loosely closed and the bones of his spine are like carefully placed white stones in a path. “Sandy?”

  “I’m here, darling.”

  Blood comes from Jay in an endless ribbon.

  The bad nurse enters and stops it with the fierceness of her ability. Bad triumphs over evil.

  I am inconsolable.

  “Sandy?”

  40

  I WALKED DOWN THE hall toward the telephone booths. A black orderly moved, whistling, past me. He was wheeling a garbage cart. I reached into my purse and found a coin to call the operator. “Operator,” I said. “I want to make a person-to-person call to Honolulu, Hawaii.” My voice was clear and steady and reasonable. I told her to charge the call to my home telephone number. I even gave her Jay’s name and the address of our apartment.

  Then I listened to a cacophony of sounds: bells, whistles, clicks, hums. Operators spoke to one another and their words were scattered, as if spoken in a strong wind. Outside the telephone booth, a man waited to make a call. He looked at his watch, he rubbed his nose, and looked at his watch again. Voices said numbers and names. They thanked one another.

  The man began to pick his nose. On the wall above the telephone someone had written, Call Erica if you want it. This is an underwater call, I thought. Cables coiled like serpents on the floor of the ocean. Call Erica if you want it. The man outside did a nervous little soft-shoe step. There was no air in the telephone booth. The telephone booth was under water.

  Then Mona said, “Hello? Hello?”

  What time is it in Honolulu? What will I do when the water is over my head?

  “New York?” Mona was incredulous. “Sam, Sam, hurry up, it’s the children!”

  Then my voice began to speak, shattering sea life for miles and miles.