Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  Turns out Dennis had done even better than I’d fantasized about in the dot-com world—which was evaporating daily from the sidewalks in SoMa. Karen would easily become a multimillionaire librarian in our generous, community-property state.

  I was a bit surprised—although absolutely delighted—by her statement that she’d want to go on and produce a feature film. With my little cancer subplot occurring simultaneously with finishing up post on Hell for the Holidays, any ideas I had about another movie had been relegated to that Scarlett O’Hara portion of my mind, which was really good at putting things off.

  My follow-up appointment with Dr. Kim was the next day, and I wasn’t thinking about that, either.

  This was where we’d discuss the pathology report from the operation itself. I imagined some short, bespectacled, highly qualified Asian woman actually had cut up my prostate and looked, under a microscope, at everything, the blood and the bits, that he’d taken out of my abdomen.

  * * *

  I was in the middle of listening to the rest of the 142 voice mails that had been left for me when I got to the one from the sperm bank.

  Or rather, the two back-to-back messages from the sperm bank. The first was from Canada, the receptionist who collected the sperm-donation cups. It seems that she was also in charge of billing.

  “Mr. Schmidt, this is FertilOptions,” she began. “Your storage invoice from January is now thirty days past due. Please remember, we dispose of the vials belonging to you once the sixty-day past-due date hits, so please get that check in or you’ll need to make fresh donations—and only once all bills have been settled.” Click.

  While I’d been gone, Jake had intercepted all my mail, including any bills that required my attention, and then forwarded it on to me—or so I thought.

  I hadn’t told him about the sticky little matter of sperm storage. The expensive fish from Galleria Café rotated deep within me, as if I were an unbalanced Maytag. Had Jake indeed seen it and purposely kept it from me? If I didn’t pay the bill, my little guys would die, and…well, that can’t be what he wanted.

  Maybe it was what he wanted.

  Stop!

  Stop this useless making up of stories—always bad stories, never good ones. If the sperm cells did die, that was it, because whether Canada Smith realized it or not, there weren’t any more to be had, and that would just be the end of it.

  The second sperm-bank call was from Janine Fromm herself.

  “Ben, good news!” she began. “I’ve got candidates to talk to you about; healthy women who’d all make excellent mommies. Call me as soon as you get back, and we’ll start the show.” Click.

  Interesting way to refer to artificial insemination, I thought. Perhaps Janine had been the star of her high school musicals and felt the need to instill some showbiz repartee into her FertilOptions job.

  It seemed a little quick, a decision I couldn’t possibly make, at least today. When Dr. Kim tells me I’m cured of cancer.

  With luck, any child would get my discriminating focus and not my addictive personality.

  Speaking of which, a drink or some drugs suddenly seemed like a really good idea. Now that I was back in San Francisco, the substances could be incorporated into my regular lifestyle. It had been so long. Ideally, I’d like a smorgasbord effect—bourbon on Monday, some calming marijuana by Wednesday, maybe adding in some coke on Thursday or Friday heading into the weekend, for which I’d need to make sure I had plenty of bourbon again to take the inevitable edge off.

  But there was something to worry about, something preventing the immediate adoption of this plan.

  Jake. Upstairs. He’d figure it out. He’d disapprove. That naturally clean-living lifestyle that came so effortlessly—and was one of the things that so strongly attracted me to him in the first place.

  Maybe there’d be a way to get him to join me in the debauchery. Come to think of it, he’d be really hot a little toasted, a little heavy lidded, unsteady, coming toward me, naked, of course, naked…

  We were having dinner later. I’d float the idea.

  * * *

  Karen’s lunchtime hint to move in with me was received loud and clear. When I got home, she called to apologize—feeling that perhaps she’d dominated the conversation with her own problems and didn’t give equal time to my cancer.

  “Nonsense,” I said, looking through the pile of bills, community college catalogs, pizza and Thai take-out flyers, and all the rest of the neatly piled dreck Jake had left for me—still hunting for the FertilOptions statement.

  “I guess it’s not every day one’s husband leaves,” she admitted. “Thanks for listening.”

  “Oh, honey, of course.” I grunted as I bent over to see whether anything had fallen under the couch. Just the expected mousetrap, thankfully empty.

  “What’re you making for dinner?” she said. “That’s a pretty functional kitchen, isn’t it?”

  She was the great cook, not me. “You remember that the sink’s in the pantry, not the kitchen, right? And that there’s less than zero counter space?”

  She laughed. “How did they ever do it back when they made bread every morning?”

  “It’s not something I think about much,” I said. “Anyway, you should know by now it’s not going to be me—Earth Father above’s cooking something up.”

  Maybe the FertilOptions bill got lost in the mail. “Give Jake a kiss for me?”

  “Several.”

  “I guess we’ll be talking, then,” she said, a note of expectation in her voice.

  * * *

  Since there was no alcohol in the house, I went down to the liquor place on Castro.

  Maybe I’d decant the whiskey. He—Jake—wouldn’t want to see the bottle, the distillery label. His father was a drunk who lived on some leased acreage up near Auburn. I suspected it was in an actual trailer, which would make Jake authentic trailer trash, something he would never confirm but not actually deny, either. It might have lent him some “up from the bootstraps” cred in that art world he inhabited, Sierra foothills angst.

  I was curious about the old fucker and had visions of a Jed Clampett or other inebriated overall-wearing yahoo who was just one step away from blowing your head off with a loaded shotgun.

  Bad memories for Jake, as if it wasn’t bad enough his boyfriend was a cancer mess and had started drinking again, too. I’d hope he’d decide to join me, if even just a little. It would help him as well. He suffered from neuropathy, a nasty side effect of the protease inhibitors he took to keep the HIV at bay.

  Jake wasn’t one to complain. I could tell he hurt only when he resisted something like the short walk down the hill, which usually meant his feet hurt. Actually, it meant his feet were killing him.

  He’d say something like, “Sweetie, it’s so nice in here and so cold out there; why don’t we just watch some TV?”

  It was rather bold of me to take the whiskey, still in its brown paper bag, up the back stairs—past Keith and Ralph’s service porch, stacked with empty laundry detergent boxes, like some odd, off-gallery art installation. I’d heard them walking above me; I knew they were home.

  As I turned the doorknob to Jake’s kitchen, fennel, or a similar spice, surged into my nose as humid air bathed my face. Something boiled on the stove, but he wasn’t there.

  “Jake?” I closed the door behind me and it rang—he’d hung Tibetan prayer bells over the latch, a watchdog effect for someone sans dog.

  There was rustling from beyond the kitchen. “Getting dressed; I’ll be right out,” he said, slightly muffled from behind his bedroom door.

  “Hey, nothing special on my account,” I said. “Actually, less is more. Who was it who said that?”

  I put the bag on a counter and opened the oven door. Inside something hissed and sizzled. I guessed it was a chicken concoction that made use of the aforementioned licorice-like spice.

  I felt the warmth of Jake’s body behind me before he put his hands gently on my hips. “People thi
nk it’s Mies van der Rohe—that ‘less is more’ thing. It was Robert Browning.”

  I turned around and hugged him.

  “Missed you,” I whispered into his collar.

  “Baby,” he said quietly, then kissed my neck before stroking my back—once up, once down—and then disengaged. “I want to hear all about it—Palm Springs, Australia—your adventure.”

  He went to the door and cracked it open about an inch. My eyes lingered on his ass in those clingy brown corduroy pants he wore for me and Benediction which I adored. My cock suddenly had an interest, though not stiffening, like it had reliably, for, say, the past thirty-five years. Instead, it discharged a tiny spurt of urine into the Defendor.

  Lovely. So this is what it’s come to. Den’s Delight wasn’t a fluke.

  Bring this up with Kim in the morning, and in the meantime…

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Salad, bread from the Italian place you like to go, with that chicken in the oven. And I bought Pellegrino in the real glass bottles, see?”

  He held up one of two bottles on the counter and unscrewed the top. The movement of the muscles and the veins in his tan, artisan’s hand transfixed me.

  “Fizzy water,” I said, apparently frowning because he put the bottle back down before opening it all the way. My eyes moved to the paper bag. “Something smoother—to celebrate—would be nice.”

  It was like back on set of Hell for the Holidays, directing an actor: Turn right, walk to counter, open bag, pull out bottle, smile, unscrew it. With a flourish.

  So I did that and turned, full bottle of whiskey in hand, and looked at Jake.

  There was a split-second flash of shock and hurt in those green eyes. Mercifully, he looked down at the floor or I would’ve dropped the precious…

  “Oh, God, Ben—no.”

  “What?” I forced out a little laugh.

  “You can’t be serious. You’re a fucking cancer patient, number one, and number two—”

  “I’m not going to get drunk! Just a little drink with you, to celebrate being back.”

  He backed into the kitchen door and opened it. “I won’t do this with you.” He held the door open and didn’t move.

  I thought I heard rumblings below and wondered whether Keith and Ralph had somehow pressed their ears up to the ceiling and were listening in. “You’re kicking me out?” Jake looked so sad, my heart was on the verge of breaking.

  On the verge.

  “Stay if you put down that stupid bottle,” he said. It almost sounded like a question. The slide viewer kicked in: a scale. On one side there was Jake, his chicken concoction, his bed, the memory of that drive to Palm Springs and all that went with it. On the other side were me and the whiskey and what I took to be a nice sylvan scene, Buena Vista Park maybe, suggesting peace of mind.

  I didn’t look at him; I couldn’t look at him as I brushed past on my way out. There was an urge to bitch-slap Jake, as if this were a movie playing out.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t drunk anything yet so I remembered he was stronger than me and that I was three stories up, four if you counted the garden. “Why are you getting bills from a fucking sperm bank?” he said quietly. Pretending not to hear, I walked down the steps.

  He slammed the door so hard, it shook the staircase. One of the clay pots for seedlings he kept on the landing fell and shattered on the flagstones below.

  16

  Maybe it was stupid of me to think that Jake would want to have some whiskey with me, but it was even sillier to bring it up before we ate. In my slide viewer, the half-full bottle still sat on my pantry shelf, luminous in the morning light. I imagined it there, like a shrine, while waiting in Dr. Kim’s office.

  I was ready to puke. Jake had intercepted my mail, a federal crime.

  After this, I’d go to the Slog—Dallas, Edmund, Rickie and whoever else might be there; they’d want to hear about all of it. Celebrate the good news, complain about the bad boyfriend…

  The examining room door opened with an adrenalin-inducing clunk-CLUNK.

  Dr. Kim held his clipboard and smelled of something vaguely minty you’d expect to find in the bathroom of a Tahoe ski chalet. “Good morning, Mr. Schmidt,” he said without looking at me, as he parked himself at a ledge against the wall.

  “How are you, Dr. Kim?”

  He frowned while scanning my file, that stand-in for my body, and by extension my past and my future, in easy-to-read paper form.

  “How are you doing with the pads?” he asked, continuing to read.

  “Still using about three a day.” Actually, it was more like four-plus Defendors, depending on how much espresso was in the cards on any particular day.

  “That’s about normal. You’re doing the Kegels?”

  “A hundred a day, at least. At my desk.” This was also a lie. The exercises were paramount, I’d been told, in the ability to regain my destroyed continence. I forgot most days because it was difficult to count them at the same time as doing them, a failure to multitask.

  I pumped that internal muscle that controlled pissing and shitting to make up for lost time and to distract myself.

  “Soren’s filling out all the paperwork for you to take over to Mount Horeb for your radiation,” he said so matter-of-factly you might have missed it if a large bird had flown by the window at the same time.

  “What?” I stopped the Kegels.

  Finally, he looked at me. “You’re not done here, Ben. The pathology report showed positive surgical margins. That means there’s still some cancer in your body.”

  The sun had risen high enough so now the light shone golden amber through the whiskey in the bottle on that shelf, forming a rich pool of light on the polished kitchen floor…

  “But you told me, right after the surgery, that you got it all, that the ‘problem’ was taken care of!”

  I could have cried, but I wasn’t going to fucking let that happen.

  A gust of wind off the Pacific rattled the window.

  “I’m sorry. I thought we had some room to spare, but apparently not.”

  There was a clipped double-knock on the door and Soren bounced in. “Hope I’m not interrupting,” he said, and came in anyway.

  * * *

  Mount Horeb was just a few blocks away from Presidio, so close in fact that even that Chinese gymnast kid could conceivably have some sort of dumb teenage part-time job there, like delivering mail or opening X-ray films or transporting tumors in Petri dishes from one hushed lab to another.

  He’d become so real to me that I’d given him a name: Dan Lau.

  Dan Lau, the young, muscular and smooth, highly decorated champion gymnast from Riordan High School had become more real to me than Eric Alvarez, the big cancer scaredy-cat, who I knew would ultimately abandon me because of it and who’d already greatly curtailed his IMs.

  Dan Lau was a boy who respected his elders, even if those elders were really great-looking and just a few years younger than his parents, who were stern and unforgiving and very much clung to the ways of the old country.

  I looked around through the sparkling glass lobby at Mount Horeb, hoping to see Dan at his part-time after-school job, and tried to ignore the few sad-looking old people interspersed with much younger sad-looking bald women.

  Oh, dear. This was going to be the main event: Cancer Big Tent.

  Dan Lau wasn’t there to save me that day, not there to whisk me off to his teenage boy’s room to show me his gymnastics trophies, his six-pack, his—

  “Mr. Schmidt?”

  A low, confident voice broke my reverie. They’d put me in a quiet little conference room with a fish tank. Soothing reminders of constant movement, of life, I supposed.

  The voice belonged to a tall man of about forty, I guessed, who wore fashionable black-rimmed glasses and had curly black hair, a crooked smile and a long white lab coat with some blue embroidery that said Spielberg. Underneath was a calming blue pin-striped shirt.

  “That’s me,” I sai
d. “I was looking at the fish.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Davis Sternberg, associate head of radiology here at Mount Horeb Complete Cancer Care.”

  We shook hands; his was warm and it was strong.

  “How are you, Dr. Sternberg?” I squinted to reread his coat. It did say Spielberg.

  “I see you’ve been through a lot.”

  I felt the Defendor rub against my thigh. “You might say that.”

  “Any trouble finding us, or parking?” His voice was so comforting. I was sleepy, and the electric blue and yellow tropical fish swam back and forth, over and over, hypnotic in their predictability.

  “Actually, I rode my bike up here. It’s locked up out front.”

  “You rode your bike?”

  “I try to do that; guess you could say I’m on a green kick.”

  “Don’t know if I’ve ever had a patient who rode their bike to cancer treatment.”

  He smiled and sat down, leaning in toward me. I felt a rush of warmth shoot up from my chest and fill my head.

  “There was nothing wrong with me a couple months ago. Now I’ve got a scar the size of I-5 on my stomach, I can’t get it up, I’m wearing a Defendor pad—and the funny thing about this is, I still have cancer.”

  “We’ll take care of any of the cancer that’s still there. Time takes care of the rest—you’re young and otherwise healthy—you rode your bike up here.”

  Dr. Sternberg’s crooked smile returned. “Heidi—my ex-wife—was always big into the Sierra Club. But I can’t imagine her getting on a bike here in the City.”

  OK, got it—ex-wife. Eyes to his thin yet strong fingers. No ring. Check.

  “Monica’s going to take you, and we’ll start in on the tests to define the course of treatment,” he said. “I’ll see you in a couple of days, Mr. Schmidt.” He got up and opened the door. “Call me Ben,” I said. “Mr. Schmidt’s my dad down in Florida.”

  * * *

  Monica turned out to be a less cynical straight-girl version of Soren with much better hair.