Anyway, I kept glancing away from Mona and finally the movie came back on. In the background, cats moved silently through the murk.
“The great, wonderful, healing thing about haze-outs,” Natasha said, “is that you don’t have to get interested in what you’re watching. If a completely different movie comes on after the commercial, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. This is the thing about shit. It exists only in the present. We have no memory of shit. This is why TV is the perfect medium for shit. Shit has no place in the theater, the art gallery, the cinema, the bookstore or the library. It belongs in the home.”
I was wishing she’d shut up so I could concentrate on the gory conclusion. The old lunatic was in the house, prowling around in the dark. The young fellow was still stomping around on the roof.
“The old coot’s going to touch her and she’s going to jump,” Natasha said. “So be ready.”
About eight seconds later, he reached out and grabbed her arm and she reacted hysterically, and even though we all knew it was coming, the three of us made little sitting jumps and coiled up somewhat.
“The young one’s getting ready to come crashing through the roof. Remember the leaky part of the roof, Mona? We saw it way back at the beginning. The lady called someone to come and fix the roof?”
“What lady?”
“Suck your bread, sweetie.”
I was aware of something looming in the doorway just to my right, out of range of Natasha and her daughter. I looked over there. It was Dr. Glass, motioning me to come out. I shook my head and pointed to the TV set. He gestured more dramatically, bending his knees and tilting his head, aiming an index finger across his belly toward the end of the long hall.
The young lunatic came crashing through the roof. I got up sort of halfway surreptitiously, took a final lingering look at the TV screen, and went out into the hall, following Dr. Glass into a smallish sitting room overlooking the river.
I was surprised to see he was wearing a smoking jacket and looking refreshed and rested. When I finished checking out the view, I turned to see him standing by a coffee table with a martini in each hand. He held the drinks aloft for my inspection like a magician demonstrating the utter innocence of his props before he turned them into live chickens. A pair of elongated olives glared out at me from the silvery mixtures.
“Doctor, I hate martinis.”
“Nonsense.”
“Can’t stand the things.”
“I freeze the glasses,” he said.
“Sorry, but I will have to say no.”
“That’s absurd. These are Tanqueray martinis.”
“Means nothing to me.”
“They’re precisely eleven to one.”
“They could be even money. I wouldn’t touch one.”
“I take pains not to bruise them. They’re the silkiest martinis you’ll ever be offered by anyone, anywhere.”
“No.”
“My olives come from Ninth Avenue.”
“I’m sure they’re lovely, but I just couldn’t, really.”
He put the drinks down and stood there, thinking.
“Some Jiminy Cricket?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“We find European wines overrated and overpriced. California wines as well. The whole wine mystique is ridiculous, we think. A glass of Jiminy Cricket with meat or fish is as good as anything you can find for three, four times the price.”
“Doctor, I’ve made two mistakes today. I’ve come all the way from Detroit when I probably didn’t have to. And I’ve run up sixteen flights of stairs in a senseless Race of Death. You were nice enough to give me the phone number I asked for, and I think the thing for me to do now is to take my destiny in my own two hands and go home, just go home, walk out the door and just go home.”
“Let’s begin by breaking your argument down into two parts,” he said.
Four cats raced soundlessly past the open door. The doorbell rang and Mona went running to answer. I waved to Dr. Glass and followed. I could hear him clearing his throat as I went down the hall. His coat and my coat, and his jacket, umbrella, and briefcase were on the floor where I’d left them. Mona climbed right over the whole pile of stuff and opened the door. It was Chinese food for the haze-out.
I shook the dust off my coat and hurried out.
I had trouble sleeping. It was just so eerie. The bed was only a few feet away from the Kramer. Every so often, the cube would make a small noise, changing cycles or something, and I’d get out of bed and look in on Shaver. He looked all right. He looked better than I did. Immortal, somehow. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might never wake up. I’d have him around forever. I could see myself pushing the Kramer along the boardwalk at some seaside resort. He would never wake up, and never get old, and never die. They would keep him in a little cubbyhole at the Smithsonian. The plastic shield on his Kramer would be covered with graffiti. You’d need special permission to take pictures.
At three in the morning, I ransacked the cupboard for Ralphies. Found half a bag, which I devoured with a cold beer, reading a passage from The Heart-Shaped Moment.
A certain sage found a cat lurking in his garden. The animal’s grace, stealth, and cunning filled the learned man with admiration.
“Dear cat,” he said, “can you teach me your secret movements, for I believe I have never seen such effortless beauty.”
And the cat replied, “Why would a wise man and teacher want to prowl in dark places?”
“All men envy grace,” said the sage. “All my life I have had my nose in books, and these many years of mental discipline have caused my body to become clumsy and frail. Is a yearning for physical grace such a crime in an aging man?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“Dear friend, to move as swiftly and stealthily as a cat would fill me with pleasure, bring envy to the hearts of my colleagues, and arouse admiration among the youngest and fairest of the village women.”
“I have heard it said by your own students,” remarked the cat, “that you teach a stern doctrine. Namely, all creatures are destined to act only as their natural abilities dictate. The gopher burrows. The hawk hunts from on high. There can be no deviation.”
“Totally beside the point,” exclaimed the sage. “Can you teach me your movements or not?”
The cat narrowed his shining eyes.
“It will be done,” said he.
Now the whole village turns out to watch the sage catch mice.
I was able to sleep after that, and in the morning the buzzer rang at 8:45. The first thing that went through my mind was that it would wake up Shaver, but of course that was foolish. When I pressed the intercom button, Washington Post told me it was a white female—he always mentioned race and sex before he gave the person’s name—from Nurses Anonymous. I told him to send her up.
She was very young, still in her teens, and quite, quite small. She wore floppy jeans, a pair of clogs, and an army surplus coat. Her name was Anna Maria Mattarazzo. It’s not as though I was hoping for a silvery-haired, white-clad woman with a name like Emma Stroud, from Independence, Mo., but I have to confess I was a little crestfallen at the sight of this girl. She looked as though she’d spent the last seventy-two hours ripping clothes off rock stars.
“I expected you at eight,” I said. “The lady on the phone said eight.”
“Yeah, I know, but I had to do an enema on the way in, and then my train came to a dead stop under the river. Don’t you hate it when they do that?”
“It’s okay, Anna Maria. Incidentally, I’ve been wondering why the service is called Nurses Anonymous.”
“It’s because we’re selfless. It’s like we have no identity. We only want to serve.”
“Well, that’s nice. I thought you might be a bunch of people who considered nursing a disease and got together to tell each other how your lives have been ruined by nursing, and how your families have given u
p on you, and how you finally realized you needed the help of other nurses in overcoming nursing.”
“It’s like we don’t even have names,” she said. “You don’t even know we’re here. We just care for the patient and disappear in the night.”
“Would you like some coffee, and then we can look at the Kramer?”
“Do you have a Coke? Some days I can’t get going until I have something fizzy, you know?”
I gave her a Coke and we went into the bedroom to look at the Kramer cube. She was familiar with the system and seemed to know the difference between bottles containing nutrients and bottles containing cloudy fluid. She assured me the patient would be fed and cleaned and shaved and so forth on a regular schedule. We went over the amount of time she’d be spending in the apartment and the billing procedures. I gave her a set of keys.
I said, “What do you call these bottles that are hanging all over the inside of the Kramer?”
“We call them bottles.”
I smiled weakly.
“I can’t believe people in the profession, skilled and highly trained people with their complicated, technical names for things, would call these things anything as simple as bottles.”
“Bottles,” she said. “We call them bottles.”
That worried me.
“How long have you been a nurse?” I said.
“What nurse? Did they say you were getting a nurse? Who did you talk to?”
“I don’t know her name.”
“It was Fat Sally, I bet.”
“She sounded fat.”
“Sure, that’s who it was. That explains it.”
“Well, if you’re not a nurse, what are you?”
“I’m a nurse’s aide. It just means I don’t have a degree.”
“It just means you’re not a nurse.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
She had black hair reaching practically to the base of her spine, and very dark lipstick—I think it was an Ultima shade called Black September—and her fingernails were covered with many coats of dark, dark polish. None of this seemed to go with the name Nurses Anonymous. But since she wasn’t a nurse to begin with, maybe it didn’t matter.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your work, Anna Maria. I have a plane to catch.”
“Can I bring my boyfriend up?”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“He picks me up wherever I’m working that day in his car. He comes and gets me, that’s all.”
“If it’s just to pick you up, I guess that’ll be all right.”
“We might watch TV. Half an hour.”
She was so small and young looking I felt like a chaperone for the Miss Teenage America Pageant. You wouldn’t call her dewy eyed, however. I figured she and her boyfriend spent many a white-hot hour locked in still-life embraces in various parts of his car.
“This makes the second job in this area,” she said. “I have an old lady right nearby who broke her fibula.”
She pronounced it fib-yu-la, with the accent on the middle syllable. It was hardly an earthshaking mistake. We all make that kind of mistake. If she had mispronounced a different kind of word, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But it was a word for a part of the body. She was a nurse’s aide, and her job was to care for the body and its parts. It seemed a little worrisome that a nurse’s aide would mispronounce a word for a part of the body.
I flew back to Detroit, and two minutes into the game with the Red Wings one of their defensemen gave me the hardest check I’ve ever received in my life. When my body hit the boards, it made a noise that sounded like Caribou, Maine.
That woke up the crowd. It was Philadelphia all over again. In that mysterious, spontaneous manner, the Wings realized it was all right to maim and kill Cleo Bird well, and the crowd reacted to each hit as if little bells were announcing their doggy treats, and the ice was filled with upended, sprawling, deadpan bodies. The rougher things got and the nosier the crowd, the more we were determined not to show emotion. I felt I was getting my glazed-eyed look honed to perfection. By the middle of the third period, we were dashing around the ice with such blank looks on our faces that it might have been the world’s first display of Zen hockey. We were full of inwardness and self-mastery. There was no separation between the skaters and the ice.
Sitting in my cubicle afterward, I looked up to see Murray Jay Siskind in his sixty-yard high-hurdle crouch, staring at me with those velvety eyes of his—that deep, rich, sneaky New York look.
“Do you know what I’m going to do for you, Cleo?”
“What?”
“The greatest thing I could ever do for a woman.”
“What?”
“Cook you dinner.”
“What?”
“Cook you the best dinner you’ve ever had in your life. This event will take place tomorrow night in Dallas-Fort Worth. Somehow, some way, I will find all the right ingredients for the perfect meal. Somehow, together, we will discover a place to prepare this meal and eat this meal. If I have to take hostages to accomplish these things, I will not hesitate. I’m a very oral person, Cleo, and eating is a sacred business with me. I don’t eat with just anyone. And I cook only for women. Name me a woman who can resist a man who cooks her a meal.”
His heavy brows quivered with a kind of frank, playful lechery.
“Oral people have a natural talent for preparing good food. Great chefs like to talk and sing and weep. I’m never happier than I am when I’m eating and talking at the same time. And that’s what we’ll be doing twenty-four hours from now, somewhere in that nameless wilderness between Dallas and Fort Worth.”
At the hotel, I was just crawling into bed when the phone rang. I realize there are more telephone conversations in this memoir than there are in the bugging files of the FBI. That’s life on the road. You can’t make deathless prose out of phone calls, but people in hotels are always reaching for the phone and if I’m going to tell you what my life in the NHL was like, we have to have some ringing phones. I don’t see any major thematic material coming out of these phone calls, and that’s what worries me more than recounting the calls themselves. It is not exactly cloud-capped stuff.
This was tennis wiz Archie Brewster.
“Cleo, finally found you.”
“Hello, Archie.”
“Been trying for days.”
“Here I am.”
“Is our date still on?”
“Sure.”
“I have a house in Dallas-Fort Worth.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s my U.S. base of operations. Boy needs a place to call home.”
“How is Floss?”
“Floss is Floss. What can I say? She’s a survivor, my old Aunt Glad, you better believe it.”
“Where is she?”
“One hotel behind me.”
“Where are you?”
“Acapulco. What time do you get in to D-FW?”
We made arrangements to meet at the airport. All through the second half of the conversation, I was thinking about Murray Jay’s dinner proposal, but the team had three days and two nights in Texas, so I figured I’d be able to sort it all out. It would be nice seeing Archie again.
Before the phone rang, I’d been all set for a night of solid sleep. One of those wintry plunges into the depths. You jump into bed wearing a flannel nightgown and socks. You bury yourself in sheets, blankets, bedspreads, and pillows. The body is curled like an autumn leaf. Knees up. Elbows down. Loose ends tucked in toward the navel. Gradually you envelop yourself in warmth. Your mind contains only incomplete thoughts. You begin slipping into silence and darkness. Nothing intrudes from the outside world. Your body gives a little jerk and then you curl up even tighter—warm and snug and safe. The Uterus Hilton.
Unfortunately, Archie’s phone call forced me into a state of alertness. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for at least an hour. I decided to se
ek revenge on a whole species. I picked up the phone and called my brother in Sunnyvale, California.
“Hello, jerk.”
“Who’s this?” he said.
“I purposely put off calling you for a few days. I was so angry and disgusted I was afraid I’d say things that would haunt both of us in our twilight years.”
“Hey, it’s Cleo. Hey, Cleo.”
“What’s the idea of being in that movie?”
“What movie?”
“You know what movie.”
“Movie? I’m thinking. What movie?”
“The Open Kimono with Seymour Hare.”
It was easy to picture his expression. Slow light dawning in his eyes. Sly amusement.
“They released that movie?”
“You bet, Ace.”
“Well, I’m just flushed with delight. We never thought that movie would get out of the can. The bank seized the prints. Maybe now we can do the sequel. The Tiger’s Revenge with Claude Balls. Did you see me in the underwater sequence? It’s a home movie, basically. The whole microcomputer group was in it. It was edited by nine people drinking apricot brandy. So, how was I?”
“Oh, great. Mom and Dad are very proud.”
“Oh, no kidding. Did they see it? Fan-tastic.”
“We went together. Mother McCormack came, in her wheelchair, and the funeral was three days later. We buried her on a hill overlooking the river. Mom is in a white cotton shift at the state mental hospital. She’s painting her walls with spinach. And Dad is officially a Missing Person. I think he sedated himself and took one of those ninety-nine-day See America tours on a Greyhound.”
“I wish they’d really see it. Take them, Cleo. Go on, I dare you. What a stunning turn of events. I’d give anything.”
“I feel like your maiden aunt instead of your younger sister. I’ve been your maiden aunt since you were six and I was three. You’re my only foothold on being a grown-up.”
He made cackling noises.
“Where are you, Cleo?”
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