Ending (2 page)

I said, “Do you need more pajamas? Do you want another pen?” And we went on like that for a while in sentences that might have been simple translations in a foreign language class. Are you hungry? Would you like the blinds closed? What time is it?, until my hands flew up restlessly to the sides of my face. I brought one hand down and looked at my watch.

“Do you have to go?” The question was so quick and his voice so high with disappointment that I felt ashamed, as if I had been caught in a rude gesture.

“Yes,” I said, “no, I could stay a while. The children …” My words trailed off. In this new setting, the green walls and the modest curtains, we had nothing to say to one another. On the first day we had disposed of all the obvious comments and the jokes about hospital odors, about the voice on the loudspeaker summoning doctors as if it announced sales in the bargain basement. Ladies, ladies, for the next hour only, on our lower level …

I stayed another half hour and then I left in a rush of activity when another patient was brought into the room to occupy the other bed. He was older than Jay and his wife walked behind him with her eyes down. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he murmured, as if he had intruded upon us in our own bedroom.

Jay said, “I’ll come with you to the elevator.” He took my hand, now disguised in a glove, and we walked down the hallway. “Don’t worry, sweetie—and drive carefully.”

“I will. I’ll bring the books.”

“So long.” His arm hooked across my shoulders, circling my neck. It was slightly painful, as if he were demonstrating strength and power that the sag of his pajamas and the shuffle of his bedroom slippers belied.

It had snowed lightly again and I wiped the windshield with my woolen glove until the sting of the cold came through to my hand. I put the radio on for company and part of the way home I listened to a song about eyes that haunted, like pools of night. “Like po-ols of night,” I sang, “I ca-an’t forget you.”

Harry came to the door first. Even as my key turned in the lock, I could hear scuffling sounds on the other side. I bent to embrace him and he let me, his face passive. How was it possible to be so controlled at five? Then his brother pushed between us and my face was wet with passionate kisses.

The baby-sitter, who is a neighbor’s adolescent son, came from the living room with a cupcake in one hand and a radio pressed against his head as if it were a poultice to soothe an aching ear. There were crumbs clinging to his lips. The sight of him, that half-finished look, his shirt on his shoulders as if it hung from a wire hanger, filled me with sadness.

“Hello, Joseph,” I said.

He tried out his voice. It was the strange croak of a large flightless bird destined for extinction. “Hello,” he said. “How is Mr. Kaufman?”

“All right. Was everything okay here? Did you have any trouble?”

He shook his head and then Paul, my younger son, wrapped his arms around the tower of Joseph’s legs. “Don’t go home, don’t go home,” he begged with a false cry of love. A three-year-old’s such a baby, still capable of innocent deceit. But Joseph believed him and was flattered.

I too wanted to cry “Don’t go home!” as if that tall stooped creature with bitten nails, who was already loping toward the door, could save me from anything.

I went to see Jay every day, twice a day when I could manage it. When Joseph was unable to stay with the children, his mother would come. But this was less satisfactory, because his mother had an insatiable hunger for medical detail, for terrible truths. When she said “How is he?” there was a light in her eyes that pierced bone and traveled bloodstreams. Her arms folded under her breasts, she waited for answers that I couldn’t give. But she would know, even in the absence of words. Then, I thought, everyone in the building would know, as if a coded message were being sent in the clanking of the incinerator door and the moan of the elevator. Every day Paul said, “Is my daddy in the hospital?” When I said, “Yes, you know. I told you this morning, I told you yesterday,” he smiled.

Harry didn’t ask. He knew where Jay was. He knew my moods with the sensitivity of a lover, but he gave no sign and no comfort. At night his head banged against the wall that separated our rooms. I wished then that Harry was my favorite, that I could love his mystery more than Paul’s easy charm. Everyone loved Paul best; he hardly seemed to need me as well.

Jay said, “I feel better today. I know I feel better because I’m going crazy in this place.”

The man in the other bed lay back with his arms folded behind his head as if he were taking a sunbath. Every time I looked at him, he was looking back and he was smiling.

I smiled at him too. I smiled at Jay, at the nurses, at orderlies who sang in the hallways with the easiness of people working in a summer field. Then I tried not to look at the other man at all. “Jay,” I said. “I miss you.”

He turned his head and slyly, out of the corner of his mouth, he whispered, “I miss you too. I’ll come home and you can give me the golden cure.”

“Oh, I will.”

His hand moved carefully and came to rest in the slope between my knees. I looked at the other man. He smiled and looked toward the window.

“I really feel better,” Jay said. But that night he stayed in bed when I walked to the elevator.

Joseph’s mother was the baby-sitter. “Everything okay?” she asked, and I looked away from the eager face, fat and flushed as if she had just bent over a hot oven.

Instead I cuddled the children, pulling Harry up onto my lap while Paul pushed to replace him. Then I opened my purse to pay her.

“They can do miracles today,” she said cheerfully, and with the triumph of the last word, she waddled out the door.

M
Y MOTHER CALLED ON
the telephone. “Come down to the shop,” she said. “We’ll give you a good wash and set. You’ll feel like a million bucks.”

“Ma, I don’t need a wash and set.”

“Come. Daddy will use a conditioner, a cream rinse.”

I reasoned that maybe it would be good to look pretty for Jay, that my hair could be a disguise for the disheveled state of my spirit.

My mother and father have owned the beauty shop for so many years that it is as familiar as a room in which people live. The pink chairs are rooted to the floor in a tidy row, facing the long mirror like vain women. On the walls models showing the latest hairdos look down and smile with perfect teeth. The partnership in the shop was always more binding, more sacred than the marriage itself. There, pulling a comb through knots in customers’ hair, my mother remembers old grievances: women, real and imagined, lies, truths more painful than lies.

My father, with an eye on himself in the mirror, pumped the pedal so that a customer ascended to his reach. He wore the latest style in jackets for hairdressers and a white ascot bloomed at his throat. The name
Mr. B.
was embroidered above the breast pocket. “Mr. B., am I dry?” called the women under the dryers.

My mother wore white nylon that revealed only shadows of her body underneath. Her name, Rose, was in red on the swell of her right breast.

All the sweet and bitter smells were still there, and the hum of the dryers and the dying and rising voice of WABC bringing the latest of the top one hundred songs in America. Most of the songs sounded alike in that drone of electrical equipment and no one really listened except once in a while when a particular song bleated through clearly and one of the women shouted, “Oh shh, quiet, it’s
him!
Listen to that, it’s my favorite song.”

Then some of the other women would sing along, their eyes shut and their wet nails splayed in front of them.

“Sandy,” my father said, coming to the door. “How’s my baby?”

Oh, it was good to be that for a while, to be innocent with the plastic cape circling my body, to be led to the seat in the back where my father let warm water fall on my head like love. My mother came and went on rubber soles like a consulting physician during surgery.

My father massaged my scalp and he hummed something discordant with the music from the radio, and I thought of Jay. With my eyes shut, I saw the room that he was in and the blurred image of all the rooms I passed on the way to his, and the clinical business of death, the death textures of plastic and rubber and steel, of tubes and wires. I sat up gasping, like someone just saved from drowning.

“Isn’t that better?” my father asked, and he closed a warm towel over my ears.

I
BEGAN TO BE
jealous of Jay’s relationship to the hospital. It was as if he had moved to a new neighborhood without me and had made friends I didn’t know. He was familiar and easy with the terrain and the life-style, while I was a transient who came with clumsy packages of fruit and books and a restlessness to leave. It seemed to be some perversity on his part to be
there
when he could have been home, to be ill when he might just as easily have been well, to withhold the nature of his illness like some coy and precious secret.

One morning I met Dr. Block in the lobby of the hospital. He said that all of the tests had not been completed, that he had to have a total picture. But he was concerned. He looked at me sternly as if it were my fault that Jay had done so poorly on some tests.

“But, do you think …?” I began.

“The tests are what count,” he said sharply, and I was reminded of cold teachers who care nothing for classroom performance. Jay would not be passed for his dear face, for a testimony from me or his mother or his children. Not for a petition signed by old friends in college, by aunts who still save letters he had written from camp. Not for old baby pictures, for his love of animals, his thin beauty, his watch ticking in my ear, for his dark hair, for the thumping of his love inside me. For nothing.

But I smiled at the doctor as if I might yet win him over. Then I went upstairs and Jay and I sat holding hands in the solarium.

“What I really need, kiddo,” he said, “I can’t get here.”

“The cure.”

“Don’t even talk about it,” he warned. “I’m dying.”

I looked up, startled, but Jay was smiling at the union of our hands. “I’m dying for you,” he said.

Across the room two elderly men in bathrobes played pinochle, slapping the cards against the table. Like Jay, they wore plastic identification bracelets, and I was reminded of banded birds.

“Last night,” Jay said, “I woke up in the middle of the night. I was dreaming. I dreamed that I was in that old apartment in Brooklyn, with my father and Mona. Except that I wasn’t a kid.”

I felt a terrible dread. “I thought that you dreamed about me,” I said.

“I do. You’re in all of my
hot
dreams. Whatever I have, that’s one of the symptoms.”

“You’ve
always
had that,” I said.

“But this was really strange. I was in my old bed. My father was alive. He was looking out through the window. My mother was cooking something. I wondered what I was doing there.”

Later when we said good-bye at the elevator, Jay told me that the man in his room had gone home and that they had put a kid in with him. “I think it’s something serious,” he whispered.

Everyone has something serious, I thought. Then I remembered his mother. “Listen,” I said. “Do you think I should mention all this to Mona, when I write to her?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he tugged absently on my hair. “No. Why should we get her worried over nothing? She’s so far away and I’ll be home before she’d even get the letter.”

I nodded, happy to be in on the duplicity, on this lighthearted view of things. Then the elevator came, and like two people who are hopelessly unable to end a long distance call, we said:

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

“I love you.”

“Me too.”

“Let the children call.”

“Tonight.”

“You’d better go.”

“We’re holding up the elevator.”

“Call.”

“I will.”

“Don’t forget.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

During the night I woke up in the wide expanse of our bed and I wondered, What if it’s true?

T
HE BOY IN JAY’S
room had been reduced to an exquisite delicacy. His pallor, the drooping stalks of his wrists were like those of the saints in medieval paintings. I thought that if he were to take off his hospital gown we would find him transparent, and all of the intricate machinery pulsing inside him would be visible to the eye. He was a lovely boy. His name was Martin and when Jay introduced us, he pushed himself upright to shake hands with me.

Martin’s hobby was photography and he couldn’t believe his good luck to be rooming with a cameraman. He had been worried that he would be put into the children’s ward with crying babies getting their tonsils yanked out. “This is terrific,” he said.

“This boy knows something about lenses,” Jay told me and Martin lay back against the pillows with a satisfied smile.

“Mr. Kaufman,” he said. “One thing is I talk a lot. It’s my bad habit. My mother says I’m like a phonograph. When you want to, tell me to shut up. It’s the only way to turn me off. I’ve always been like this, even as a kid. I drive my teachers crazy. Nobody can get a word in edgewise. So when you want to, tell me to shut up, and I will.”

Jay told him that he was glad for the company, that he was lucky to have someone with the same interests in his room.

“Boy,” Martin said. “What if I had some moody guy? You know, someone nervous. I’d drive him up the wall.”

Martin seemed so sick that he made Jay appear well. It’s only a trick, I thought, like something done with a camera. I looked at Jay sharply to detect any changes. Was he thinner, had his color changed? Did I ever mark all the subtle changes that had taken place since I first met him? When do we become mortal?

One day I walked into the room and something was being drained in through Martin’s wrist from a bottle. “My shutter arm,” he said in mock despair.

I brought an album of Jay’s stills and they talked into the afternoon about openings and zooms, their voices rising and falling in a soporific wave: f. 4.5, wide angle, f. 11. We might have been a family in our own home on a winter day. But the secret fluid ticked into Martin’s arm and the antiseptic stench was everywhere.