FRONT AND CENTER in Mal’s vernal living room, the hospital bed looked like a slug on a gardenia plant. Mal was being released that afternoon, and Lucinda had asked me to shop. “Make the place extra-homey,” she added. “Plump up the pillows and all that.” I bought food—rice, crackers, soft American bread, plain white foods for the toothless—and various “aids” from the chemist which, though each innocuous (alcohol, cotton, peroxide . . .), unnerved me by their sheer number. At least, I reassured myself, adult nappies were not on the list.
What had happened was this. The night after I left for Paris, Mal had taken Lucinda out to a local restaurant—the Gondolier’s Pantyhose, from her description. His appetite had been good, she said, but hers had not been good enough, and for that she did not know how to forgive herself. Happy with bread, Mal had ordered nothing to start, while she had ordered carpaccio. But it wasn’t what she had expected, all that bright pink meat. She pushed it over to Mal, who said that suddenly, in fact, he was ravenous. “What the hell,” he had said, though she hadn’t understood why at the time. The more he could eat, the better, she had reasoned.
They had talked about his father’s campaign (she had persuaded Mal to attend a Memorial Day parade in his parents’ town) and then argued happily about the meaning of the word miracle. Lucinda had criticized her son for overusing it to refer to perfectly ordinary, if nevertheless astonishing, creations of God. “By that definition, everything is a miracle, which devalues His most extraordinary feats,” she said with sunny indignation.
I indulged her digression; consciously or not, she was nailing down a memory for herself.
They had parted outside the restaurant. At three in the morning, she had been roused by the telephone. (This, I guessed, was when Mal had tried to reach me in Scotland.) Mal had got himself to the emergency room after waking up feverish and vomiting. The doctors were fairly certain that the beef was the source of the salmonella. “I had no idea the meat was raw or I never would have let him touch it!” said Lucinda. “I’m such a hick, I thought I was ordering an eggplant thing with capers I had in Boston once.”
I had visited Mal the previous day, taking with me as laughably inadequate penance a splashy but scholarly volume on the history of Italian opera; he had seen it in a catalogue on my desk at the shop, so it would come as no grand surprise. I prepared myself for his anger, and for his appearance, which I supposed would be one of greater emaciation and pallor.
In my unflagging self-interest, I somehow assumed I would be his only visitor (other than his archangelic mother). So when I entered his room and saw four complete strangers around his bed, chatting and laughing, I could only stop in the doorway, dumb.
Mal saw me at once, or I might have left. “Fenno,” he said smoothly, though he was hoarse, “meet a few of my ex-colleagues.” I did not meet Mal’s eyes until I had shaken hands with a dance critic, two food writers, and a copy chief. A large terra-cotta pot of moss and orchids posed effetely on a table, next to a telephone, a box of tissues, and a yellow plastic pitcher.
These people were more than old colleagues; they were friends. One of them, a stylish gray-haired woman, sat on the edge of Mal’s mattress. A young man in black, the dance critic, poured him a cup of water. Sometime in our acquaintance, I had forgotten that I was not a part of Mal’s mainstream life, that he had chosen to keep me drifting along on my separate, obscure little tributary. I had forgotten that I was hardly his only source of help or companionship. I was a neighbor, a valet, a pet-sitter. I felt humbled and insulted.
When we looked at each other now, over the shoulder of the gray-haired woman, who was serving up some spicy rumor about someone whose name I knew vaguely as a byline somewhere in the paper, I could see no malice or anger in Mal’s sunken eyes. It was as though he had no memory of our pact, that I would be there to make sure no one violated his dignity just to keep the electronic graph of his heart rising and falling into oblivion. I pictured him on a ventilator, a frightfully well-preserved man-size parsnip or celery stalk, and thanked whatever fortunes had pulled him out of the ICU.
So we had not yet been alone when I unpacked the provisions for his flat. After putting away the foods, I unwrapped the cut hyacinths I had bought at outrageous expense and arranged them in a purple glass pitcher from Venice. I laid a fire but did not light it, uncertain if smoke of any kind might be forbidden. Mum, in her last winter, could not tolerate a fire.
Outside, the light was failing; I switched on lamps. I sat on the couch against the windows, but this put me face-to-face with the hideous behemoth that had taken the place of the velvet chaise (now exiled to the dining room). As I returned to the kitchen to look for a beer or a bottle of wine, I heard Lucinda’s voice in the stairwell.
When I opened the door, I could see Mal, supported between Lucinda and a strange man. I could see how quietly infuriated he was by their help and did not offer to join in. “Oh darling, will you put on some water for tea?” Lucinda called up when she saw me.
“Yes, everyone make their darling selves at home, pretty please,” said Mal, his voice a hiss as he willed himself up the stairs.
The strange man was Mal’s brother, Jonathan. He had Lucinda’s curly auburn hair and slim, compact build, but a very different face, round and well-fed, a face without the character of bone. He seemed in a mild panic, anxious to do whatever was required but helpless without direction. “Oh! Yes!” he would exclaim when his mother asked him to fetch something or help her with the levers on the bed.
Mal sat sideways on the couch, knees drawn up, facing the fireplace. He asked me to light the wood. “I’m not sleeping there,” he told Lucinda as she fussed with the bed, trying to raise the upper half. “So send it back.”
“You don’t have to, certainly not now,” she said, “but eventually you might find . . .”
“That I’m near enough death to do so.”
Lucinda stood by the bed looking miserable. Jonathan excused himself to go to the loo. He’d done that just fifteen minutes before.
“I think you’ve had enough of my company for now,” she said quietly. “Am I right?”
“Yes, Mother,” said Mal. “Perhaps that’s it.”
She said to me, “Would you mind if Jonathan and I just . . . if we slipped out for a bite? We’ll be back in an hour.”
I told her that of course I didn’t mind. I was relieved when Mal made no comment. (What made it my business to mind?) I think he just wanted them to leave.
It was hard not to stare. His Adam’s apple protruded like a morsel of food trapped in his throat, and even through his T-shirt, the place where his clavicles came together looked too precise, the architecture of his body much too evident. The backs of both his hands were bruised purple and yellow from IVs, and there was a bandage at the base of his throat, probably a sign of intrusions which I had agreed to prevent—or, at the least, to oversee.
Looking at Mal in profile, I thought of the expression “so thin she disappears when she turns sideways,” which I had heard someone use to describe one of these malnourished girls now looming above the city on billboards. That this aesthetic should be in fashion now seemed cruel, even sadistic.
I sat on the opposite end of the couch. For a time, we listened to the whipcracks and sizzlings of the fire.
“Thank you for the book. I looked at it before I went to sleep last night,” he said.
“You’re welcome. I bought a few for the shop.”
“Carlo is a friend, you know. Did I mention that? We’ve been out of touch a year or so, but I’ve stayed at his house on Lake Como. He’s done a very thorough job; I’ll have to write him a note.”
“The pictures are stunning,” I said. “They make even me a little curious at what I may be missing.”
Mal continued to focus on the fire. He smiled. “Operas are miracles, you know. How they come together, all those meticulous arts enfolded in one . . . A small miracle, mind you, not one of the big ones, not like babies and whales. I’m convinced of
it, but my mother tells me I’m blaspheming.”
“I heard about that. She’s very dogmatic. She has to be.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Mal said slowly, “but she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. That operas are a proof of something divine.”
“She means that miracles aren’t a proof. Aren’t proofs of God, by their very intent, heretical? She means they’re a demonstration. An end unto themselves.”
“No, a random grace. Something like that.” He sighed. The few words he’d uttered so far had chilled me. His voice sounded different, too calm. It felt as if he had gone away on one of those modern retreats which cleanse the brain but shrivel the soul.
After a long silence, he said, quite gaily, “So let me guess. While I was in the clutches of several Dr. Frankensteins—tubes in and out the wazoo—you were off somewhere with the ponytail, yes?”
“The . . . excuse me?” I’d known the pleasantry couldn’t last.
“The fetching ponytailed boy—man, definitely man—you entertain from time to time. Though I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“I . . .”
At last, he looked straight at me. “Why have you taken such pains to hide him? Do you pay him? You’re not homely enough to be that desperate.” He smiled, as if he felt sorry for me. “Did you forget that my windows look into yours as well? The physics of reciprocity?”
“There’s plenty of your life you’ve kept from me,” I said.
“Was there some part of my life you knew about and wanted to know better? My privileged status at countless shallow cocktail parties, all that kissy-kissy closeness with famous and semifamous artists, was that something you wanted to share? I didn’t think you cared about such things. I thought better of you. Or did you want in on my late-night crying jags?” He said all this with an almost happy calm, no sarcasm, no sorrow.
“Yes,” I said. “I was with the ponytail—Tony. I don’t know why I thought I’d fooled you.”
“Why fool me to begin with?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because it’s habit. Because hiding things is a habit with you. Even hiding things from yourself, hiding your head in the sand. What kind of a life do you have? Eating and walking and dreaming in a quarter-mile radius, just like a dog on a stake. Hanging out with Ralph Quayle, E.S.Q., Petty Emperor of Bank Street. Going home every Christmas to be with your nice but myopic brothers. People who can never quite love you, I’m sorry to say, because they will never quite understand you.”
I did not answer. My power to defend myself had seized up like an ill-used joint. Out of the cerebral blue came my old mantra, my marching orders. Upright, upright, upright. Looking rigorously ahead, never down or to the side, had failed me. Dismally. I had meant it as a way to survive, and maybe I had, but I had not kept an eye on my footing, only on my direction.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll never know how sorry I am. I made the mistake of thinking—”
Mal interrupted, but wearily. “Well, I’m still alive, that should be something, shouldn’t it? Though I do keep thinking of the drug they gave me to paralyze me, to keep me from fighting the ventilator. I’m not supposed to have any memory of that; I was in too deep a state of trauma, I’m told. Or of those electric smackeroos they applied to my chest . . . Now that, talk about miracles, now that starts you up again, I mean wham.”
I saw Mal, lying on a table, clinically dead, and I saw Lucinda, pleading “Anything! Do anything, please!” and honestly, would I have overruled her? Or wasn’t she there yet? Would I have been there first? Would Mal be dead now and I feel somehow proud, like a soldier who’d followed his orders under heavy fire? Wasn’t it best that he was still here, as he admitted, kept among the living no matter what the methods?
“Now. It’s time to talk about this thing.” I looked up from my lap. Mal was pointing at the hospital bed. “Meet Death,” he said to me. “Death,” he said to the bed, “meet my dear friend Fenno.”
I wanted to laugh but didn’t.
“Do you know what my T-cell count is now? One hundred. In school, that’s a perfect score, A-plus. But this isn’t school. I’m a party of pathogens just waiting to happen. Ever heard of cryptococcal meningitis? Well. Just the sound of the name gives you a notion.
“So Mom, she’s nothing if not a planner. She’s brought in her lovely hospice people. I had a visit in my hospital room. A girl named Mary—how quaintly perfect—who looks like Candice Bergen times two. After she left, my teeth began to chatter.” Mal raised his eyebrows, as if inviting me to comment, but he went on.
“You know, sheets, just bedsheets on my legs can be excruciating. It’s sort of like having a sunburn but worse. The hairs on my legs bore down into their follicles like tiny pins. Carlo’s book? To read it, I had to set it beside me on pillows. Sometimes I’m certain my eyelids are crushing my eyeballs, and when I climb stairs, every little gismo in my knees puts up an independent protest. There’s so much physical pressure. I don’t want to die, but I would love to trade in my body—for just about anything. Last week, or two weeks ago, I’ve lost track—anyway, before this crisis, my tiny inner guests who trashed their suite so rudely—I was out at Montauk with friends—yes, real, true-blue friends you’ve never met, and I’m sorry if somehow this made you feel bad, not meeting them all, I’m sorry. . . . Did it ever occur to you that I kept you from the rest of my life so I could keep you to myself?” He paused to regard me fiercely, angrily, but he clearly did not want me to answer because, just as quickly, he looked away.
“We went to the beach. There was a break in the cold, the sun was heavenly, so we took chairs and blankets and a thermos of cocoa. One of the children had that fabulous idea. The ocean was this incredible blue, a kind of not-quite-black, waves chopping all around, and this one sleek speedboat bouncing along. They waved, we waved. . . . It was so white, so . . . jaunty. It would leap on a wave and hover, for long moments, entirely free of the water. Like a high note held impossibly long. . . .”
He took a drink of water from the glass his mother had set on the table before she went out. “God how I envied that boat. So solid, so buoyant, so jazzy-looking. I just wanted to be that boat. I wanted to swap my body for that fiberglass hull, those polished rails, those racing stripes, that perfectly planed wooden deck. It felt like lust, I wanted it so badly. I’d have given up my brain, no problem. If I hang on much longer, I’ll be giving that up anyway, you know.”
The telephone, which Lucinda had also set close to Mal, rang. “Hello, Dad,” he said. “Yes, I’m home. Yes, I hope so. No, she isn’t.” They spoke, about the superficial details, for five minutes or so. Mal promised that his mother would call back when she returned.
He asked me to bring him a couple of pillows from his bed. I helped him arrange them so that he could recline on his back facing the fire. He winced as he rearranged his limbs.
I put another two logs on the fire and prodded them until their bark gave in to the flame.
“I told Susan,” said Mal, “I feel like three aspirin would kill me. She told me not to be deceived. The body can be quite resourceful in stopping just short of that final surrender, unwilling to evict its oldest tenants. Not like any landlord I’ve ever known.” He laughed faintly.
I could not have spoken if someone had held the brass poker to my jugular vein. I fussed about in every way I could find that kept my back to Mal, sweeping up ashes, straightening the basket of papers and kindling, examining an amethyst egg on the mantel as if I had never admired it before. But my defense was pointless.
“Basta,” he said at last, confirming my fears. “Basta, basta, basta—as my old friend Carlo and his compatriots would say. Basta.” This time the word sounded gentle, not angry. Almost sentimental.
THIRTEEN
EVER BENT ON AUTONOMY, Mal wanted to be alone in the end, but this did not mean he could do without help. Months before, he had gone to one of his doctors (Dr. Susan, I presumed, but he would not say) and expressed what he saw as his
very rational despair. He had been told that doctors cannot ethically give out certain information, but a week or so later the doctor had asked about insomnia and pain, dispensed certain drugs, and warned Mal explicitly how to make sure he did not overdose or combine drugs that should not be combined.
That week he kept mostly to his bed—his own. Contemptuously, he made the hospital bed a waystation for miscellaneous books, magazines, coats and other items of clothing. The gypsy caravan, he called it.
There were visitors every day; from my desk in the shop, I would sometimes see them ring his bell and go up, emerging within the hour. I saw one man step out onto the pavement, cover his face for a moment, look upward at nothing and sigh a voluminous sigh, his breath a visible cloud of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief. Lucinda spent as much time with Mal as he would allow; he had strictly forbidden her to miss any classes. Jonathan, whose limp demeanor I excused to fear, returned north the day after Mal came back to his flat. The sister had planned a visit but then was banned because one of her children caught the flu.
On Wednesday, Mal took his parents to a matinee of a Noël Coward play. The Senator (whom I would not meet until Mal’s memorial service) flew up from Washington for the day. On Thursday, Mal asked to be left alone until evening. He wrote letters, I suppose, since he gave me several to mail when I came by to fix dinner. Most of them were rich with stamps, addressed to France, Italy, Switzerland; one to Chile. As it turned out, he wasn’t hungry, and we watched An American in Paris, which happened to be on the telly; Lucinda arrived during the opening titles. I had moved the television back into the bedroom, so the three of us sat on the bed, propped against pillows.
Mal beamed when Gene Kelly and that obscure but quintessential Frenchman stood up from their café chairs to sing “’S Wonderful.”
“Is there anything in our culture these days that expresses this much silly joy?” he asked. “Anything like this that we’re allowed to say we love without being smirked at?”