“It’s Boswell. Get up here. I’m with the good woman next door. I’ve got no key, no one’s home. I’m sick. Hurry! Hurry!”
In a few minutes the doorman had let me into the apartment.
“It’s disgraceful,” I said. “Having to be let into my own place like this. Humiliating.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor, sir?”
“Get Dr. Green,” I said. “On Twelfth Street. Old family physician. Knows me inside out, upside down. Get him. I want Green. Call Green.”
“Yes, sir.” The doorman started to leave.
“Where’s my wife?”
“I haven’t seen Mrs. Boswell, sir.”
“The kid—David.”
“I haven’t seen him either, sir.”
“Fine way to treat a dying man.”
The doorman left. The woman in whose doorway I had stood now stood in mine. “Is there something I can do?” she asked.
“The lady of the house is not at home,” I said. I went into our bedroom and lay down. “Close the goddamn hall door,” I shouted. “There’s a draft.”
The door slammed.
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” I said. “Spry as a fly in an eye.” I rolled over, scraping my shoes across the satin bedspread. “Oh, Jesus,” I said, “what a way to die.” I placed my hand gently on my heart. “Help,” I said very softly. I made a song out of it, singing “Help Help Help Help Help Help Help Help” as if they were notes in the scale.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep and when I opened them Dr. Green was standing over my bed watching me.
“What interesting things do you keep in your bag, Doctor?” I asked, looking at his satchel.
“I’m a scientist,” the doctor said. “I don’t make house calls. You sick?”
“Oh Jesus, what a way to die.”
“What is it with you? You sick? What did you call me for? Where’s your wife? I brought a little stuff with me on dry ice. Even so, you can’t keep it too long. It melts like ice cream.” He leaned down over me. “Say,” he said, “I won’t crap you. I know how particular you are. Guess who I got in the syringe.”
“O Jesus, did I call for you?”
“Where’s your wife? What is this? The guy called and said it was an emergency. I don’t make house calls, but I remembered you and I looked upon it as a professional challenge. Jesus, the way you messed my place up!”
“Are you really a doctor? What’s wrong with me?”
“I’m very impressed,” Dr. Green said. “Your footman brought me up and let me in. This is a nice place. I like to see the stuff gets a good home.” He tapped the bag. “I’m not at liberty to disclose names,” he said, “but I got a cabinet minister in here. A president. A king!”
“Help Help Help Help Help Help Help Help,” I sang down the scale.
“Come on, where is she?”
“It’s a mistake. Go away.”
“What do you mean a mistake? I don’t make house calls. What do you mean a mistake?”
“Please,” I said. “Please. If you’re a doctor you must have taken an oath to help the sick. Go away.”
“Seventy-five bucks,” the doctor said.
“Bill me,” I yelled at him. The shout raised devils in my chest.
“Well, make up your mind, will you?” Dr. Green said.
“Get out. Now. Get out!” I moved to get up and the doctor backed out quickly.
“Frail as a snail in a pail,” I said when I was alone again. I felt very cold and I got up to pull back the spread. It was April and there was only one thin blanket on the bed. I went to the closet to look for others but couldn’t find any. At the back of the closet, high on a shelf, was a box under some suitcases where some blankets might be, but I hadn’t the strength to move the suitcases. I pulled some of Margaret’s and my clothes off the rod and staggered with them back to bed. I arranged the blanket and bedspread and clothes on top of me, but when I tried to sleep again I was conscious of the smell of cleaning fluid on the clothes. This grew stronger until it filled my nostrils, my head, my throat. At last I could stand it no longer; I knew I was going to vomit, and I tried to push back the heavy clothing. But the weight was enormous, and I threw up on the bed.
I shuddered. “I’m sick. I’m really sick.” At first this seemed genuinely strange to me, but as I thought about it I began to cherish it as a justification. It was as if this one sickness, this one real thing in my life—the smell of the vomit, the quick, cold ache that floated transitionlessly through my body as something blown by the wind—were all that I needed to underwrite my behavior. My body, frailer now than it had ever been, was my credential, my card of identity, my alibi. At last I had a legitimate need. It filled me up; for the first time in my life I began to feel outrage, the ferocious satisfaction of the injured, the framed, the damned. The feeling was at once unfamiliar and conventional, as exquisite as the slaking of a thirst.
Where were Margaret and David? Their absence was only what I should have expected, perhaps, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. Margaret’s insistence that she loved me had been true enough, but no train waited forever. What I might have loved was the train that did. And I understood, too, the David whose pleasure in me derived from a kind of humility used as keenly as a weapon.
Their hatred of me now—that was what their absence must mean—was wrong. What I had suspected about myself never seemed so true. In a way, my hands were as clean as many men’s, cleaner than most men’s. I had done nothing to foster death, nothing to encourage it. Though I had never loved anyone, neither had I hated. I was a genuinely amiable man who recognized something clear, who believed from the first what others were afraid to believe—that it was the nature of love to be forever misplaced. Love was the country bumpkin of virtues. All I had ever wanted was to five forever, without pain.
I was terrified. Now my body was my enemy. If I, like other men, had not escaped pain, at least my pains had seemed—even as I suffered them, when the imagination and the foresight were most dulled—explicable, temporary, almost secular. This was something else, different in kind. My body was pitted, gutted, oozing the fumes of decay. I was on fire.
Where
were
Margaret and David? I was square with them both now. If their desertion was hard for me it wasn’t because of love, but because they might have done something, fetched a bedpan, changed my linen, brought me drugs. Well, it was true. One’s chickens went away to roost.
I tried to think about it rationally. That Margaret had not taken her clothes meant nothing. She was a Principessa—money
was
no object. I thought bitterly of how I had failed to scold her for this. For then the presence of her clothes might have meant something; I could imagine her leaving them behind as a gesture. She could be back in Italy now, arranging with the Black Pope himself a decree, a special dispensation. Fixing beyond fixing. People could not make other people happy, I thought, and love was no debt. Yet my wife and son, with their moral U.O.Me’s, would never understand this. They had meant to bring me down with guilt, tirelessly focusing their unspoken accusations like children flashing the sun in your eyes with a hand mirror. Screw guilt. Men died. It was physics, not metaphysics.
I hauled myself out of bed, the vomit suspended in slimy strings from my mouth, and went to the bathroom. It might kill me to shower now, but I couldn’t stand my stink. I undressed clumsily and stood, weaving and ridiculous, before the full-length mirror. I turned on the shower taps full blast; the water felt like heavy knives. Drying myself, I remembered how I had felt fifteen years before in the gymnasium—powerful, and despite my size, almost light. David could beat me now.
I didn’t want to go back into our bedroom; instead I staggered into David’s room and lay on the narrow bed. Margaret had decorated the room. There was simply no sign of him; it might have been a room in a hotel. What it must have cost David, I thought, to have suppressed his sense of beauty, the single coruscation of personality he had allowed himself. How vindictive he was really; how , angry he was. Then I thought, I am a man rankled by human waste, put off by the deflection of self as other men are by high treason. I wondered that David could have misunderstood so much.
I looked sadly out at the dusk gathering like a fog on the windows and fell fitfully into a doze. In my sleep— which was not free of pain—I had the impression that I was being moved through time, past landmarks of evening and night and morning and afternoon, leaving time behind as one left behind the farmhouses one saw through the window of a moving train. But when I woke the dusk was the shade I had remembered it and I wondered whether I had slept at all. I thought I should be hungry; I tried to remember when I had last eaten. It was in the cafeteria when I had pointlessly humiliated the blind man. That was at least two days before, or, if I had slept around the clock, three. I had spent a day in my room on Fifty-eighth Street, and there had suffered the attack.
What a fool, I thought. It was the business of my life to keep on living. I was getting no treatment, no medicines. If what had happened to me was, as I suspected, a heart attack, I wondered why I had not called a doctor earlier, why I had given Green’s name when the doorman asked me if I needed help. The pains were still with me and I wondered what the world’s record was for a heart attack.
I picked up the phone beside David’s bed, but when the girl at the desk asked what number I wanted I realized that I knew no number, that though I could give her the unlisted phone numbers of half the celebrities in New York, I didn’t even know the name of a good doctor.
“Get me the doorman.”
“Roger?”
“Yes. Please. Get me Roger.”
The operator connected me.
“Roger, this is Mr. Boswell.”
“Yes, sir. Feeling better, sir?”
“Not so you’d notice, Roger.”
“That’s too bad, sir.”
“Roger, I need a good doctor. Who do the tenants use?”
“That would be Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”
“Is he a good man, Roger?”
“Yes, sir. He’s a very big man.”
“Far?”
“No, sir, he’s right in this building.”
“Well, would you see that he comes up here, Roger?”
“Dr. Mefwiss doesn’t like to make house calls, sir.”
“Goddamn it, Roger, it’s his own house. I’m too sick to move. Who knows what it’s costing me just to speak to you on the telephone? Get Dr. Mefwiss. Get him. I want Mefwiss.”
“I’ll get him, sir. I’ll get him right away.”
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Roger? When did you let me in?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“No, no. When? When did I come home?”
“That would be this morning, sir.”
“Oh,” I said, “only this morning.” I was disappointed that I had not slept around the clock. Was it possible that Margaret and David were just out for the day?
“Thank you, Roger.”
“I’ll get Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
When I put down the phone I thought of something else Roger might do for me and I picked it up again. “What’s Roger’s extension?” I asked the operator. “I might be needing it.”
She rang, but there was no answer. Roger must have gone for Dr. Mefwiss. “Just let it ring,” I told the girl.
In a few minutes Roger answered.
“What did Dr. Mefwiss say, Roger?”
“Is that you, Mr. Boswell? He said he’d come right up, sir.”
“Fine,” I said. “Thank you, Roger. You may just have saved my life.”
“You’re not to worry, sir. You’ll be all right.”
“Thank you, Roger. Nice of you to say so. Roger, I want you to go to the desk and find out if my rent’s been paid for next month.”
“Your rent, sir?”
“It’s after the twenty-fifth, isn’t it?”
“It’s the twenty-seventh, sir.”
“Our rent is due on the twenty-fifth,” I said. “My wife usually takes care of it. Look, Roger, I’ll level with you. I’m trying to figure out if my wife has left me. I can’t call the desk myself—they’d get too suspicious. I haven’t got a dime of my own, you know. She’s the Principessa, you understand. I didn’t marry her for her money exactly, but let’s not kid ourselves, she pays the bills. You see, if she hasn’t paid up that could mean she doesn’t intend to come back. If the desk found that out they’d try to evict me. I’m in a tough spot—if I’m as sick as I think, I might have to use this place for a while.”
“I see,” Roger said, astonished.
“I thought you might help me.” I lowered my voice. “I haven’t got a dime. I’m this—you know—stud.”
“Really?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t why I was sick now. The demands that women made! Anyway, I thought you might help me. You won’t make a nickel out of it, but you wouldn’t have to call me Mister Boswell.”
“I see,” Roger said.
“We’d be in it together. You and me against the syndicate that runs this place.” There was a pause as Roger thought about this. “I could tell you stories about those guys that would curl your ears. Tie-ups with gangsters, the fire chief, the unions. Fixing beyond fixing. Deals in flawed cement, watered steel. Stand clear of the building, Roger, when you blow your whistle for a cab.”
“Really, sir?”
“Jim.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘Really, sir?’ Call me Jim.”
“Jim,” Roger said experimentally.
“A deal’s a deal,” I said. “Look, someone’s at the door. Probably that doctor. Find out about the rent.”
I shouted that I was alone and too sick to move and told the doctor to go down to the desk for a passkey. In a few minutes he returned and let himself in. I told him about my symptoms in detail, explaining about the cough that brought nothing up and the pain in my side and the hunger and the flashes of prurience and the thickness of my urine and the hypersensitivity of my hair ends and finally about the pains I had been having in my chest for the past two days. I tried to tell him about this sense I had of moving through time, but by then the doctor had placed his stethoscope to my chest and was listening to my heart. I waited impatiently for him to finish and then told him again about my disoriented sense of time.
“Hmn,” he said,
“Angst.
Classical.”
Hmn, I thought.
Angst.
Popular.
“Frankly, Mr. Boswell, I find nothing the matter, with you,” the doctor said. He was one of those men who, thirty years after the fact, still have the air about them of the Middle-European refugee. “Your heart seems quite sound,” he added.