Let Me Be Frank With You (15 page)

A big I'm-with-you-on-this-one smile. “A Christmas gift,” she says jovially. Everything makes her happy. People are milling nearer us. Eyes are darting my way. They know who she is. But not me, now.
What's the problem? What's going on? Who's he? What's that?
“These are awesome. I've got one.” She's agreeing about the pillow. “They really ease the neck pain.”

“My wife has Parkinson's.” Though she's not technically my wife.

“Well, we
all
know that,” the security amazon says, as if Parkinson's was a condition anybody would want. “Lemme just give you a little squeeze.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Not
you
, you old charmer. The pillow. Lemme give her a little poofety-poof.”

Obviously I'm getting no farther without submitting. It's not usually like this. I offer up the heavier-than-you'd-expect, plastic-encased pillow, which hasn't been opened since I bought it yesterday at the Bed Bath & Beyond at the Haddam Mall. Unwelcome Indonesian spores perhaps wait inside its factory-sealed sleeve, intent on mayhem. I wouldn't have one of these things.

The security woman hefts the pillow like a medicine ball, brings it to the side of her big face as if she was listening for something inside—an Uzi or a sarin gas micro-cylinder. She squeezes it like a dog toy. It makes no noise. Most terrorists don't have ex-wives with Parkinson's whom they visit once a month. Though who knows?

“O-
kay!
” She prinks her eyebrows as if we're both in on something. She wakes up grinning, is my guess. She has alarmingly large hands. And then of course I catch on—I'm always the last to notice such things. “She's” not a “she” but a “he.” She's a Doug who's become a Doris, an Artie an Amy—now free, thanks to an enlightened electorate, to assume her rightful place in the growing health-care industry, whereas before he was dying inside selling farm machinery in Duluth. My heart goes out to her/him. My life is piffles by comparison. I wish I could make Ann's pillow a present to big Amy, and
head to Sally's birthday dinner, having done the good deed the season aspires to—instead of the deed I'm destined for.

The big galoot hands me back the pillow as if she's used to strangers taking just about this long to wise up to the whole gender deal, but is happy to have it copacetic between us now. She used to be me. She knows what that's all about—not as great as it's cracked up to be. Otherwise she'd still be there.

“You must be Frank.” Amy-Doris for the first time trades in the bozo grin for a mulling stare, making her look like nothing as much as a farm machinery salesman, only with breasts, lipstick and a beard shadow down her jawline.

“Right,” I say, as if I'm the one in drag.
Hot-diggity, dog-diggity . . .

“Annie talks about you sometimes,” A-D says. Her mulling look means I've long ago been determined to be in the wrong about many things, and it's too late to fix any of them. It's all just sad, sad, etc. Big Doug was probably a flop selling Caterpillars.

“What does she say?” I can't keep from asking, though I don't want to know.
Boom! What you do to me!

“She says you're okay. Sometimes you're kind of an asshole. But that's pretty rare.” Doug is just Doug now. We're hombre-to-hombre. Perhaps his surgery's not quite done and he's still in the stage where you wake up not knowing who the hell's living in your skin.

“That's probably true,” I say, wedging the pillow back under my elbow. Buck, I see, is treating himself to a glass of the Malbec, getting ahead of when the book-clubbers let out. Possibly he and Miss Annie have plans for later. In the distant public rooms people are applauding. The sounds of pure delight. Granny Bea's just opened her big present and been surprised as a betsy bug on a cabbage leaf.

“Hard not to be who you are,” big Doug observes, nodding. He should know. She should know.

“I keep trying to do better.”

“Well, you have to.” Big smile again. “You have yourself a merry one, Franky. Knock yourself out.”

“You have one, too.” Franky.

“Oh, I'm on my way to that. Don't worry about me.” Something cheerlessly sexual's crept into his/her voice. Though no more than with most things we say, do, think about and long to be true. Poor devil. But I've cleared customs now, am free to go. Free to find my way to the genuine woman who once was my wife.

B
UCK, BY AN EXCELLENT STROKE, HAS NOT NOTICED
me. An encounter with him would zero out my Default Self before it even had its chance. The Beth Wessel corridor, which I now enter, is like a swank hallway in the Carlyle. No hint of
infirmity or decline. Nothing wheelchair width, no wall grips, no SOS phones or defibrillator paks. Illness abides elsewhere. The walls are rich, shadowed wainscot and with an aroma of saddle leather, the above-part done in hand-painted murals of the Luxembourg, the Marais, the Seine and the Place des Vosges. Ann's told me these are all re-done yearly and there's a competition. Brass sconces add tasteful low-light accents. The carpet's gray with a green undertone you don't notice and lush as a sheep meadow. Every few feet there's a framed, spot-lit photograph—a Doisneau, a Cartier-Bresson, an Atget—or at least their imitators. Sounds are as hushed as deep space. You expect the next person you see to be Meryl Streep in a Mets cap and shades, making a discreet exit out onto a side street off the Boulevard St. Germain—not the Great Road in Haddam Township.

Ann's flat is at the end. 8-B, though there's no 8-B on the door. Doris-Doug will already have announced me by wireless means—possibly a message transmitted direct into Ann's deep-cranial band width. There are, of course, cameras, though I can't see them.

I'm ready to ring the bell, but the door opens before my finger can touch the brass-and-wood buzzer button. Ann Dykstra stands suddenly before me. It's ten before six. I know where my children are. They're grown up and far away. Thank goodness.

“I've just been watching the local news about these poor hurricane people,” Ann's saying, without a hello, a hug, a peck, just stepping back as if I was the grocery boy with sacks and can find my own way to the kitchen. “It just doesn't end, does it?” I take one step back, then come forward inside, and have to fight off pantomiming that it's cold as Alaska outside her door, and I'm lucky to be inside for warmth and a fire. There's no fire, and I'm not cold, or lucky. I'm simply here, with no reason to be except this ridiculous, crinkly, clear-plastic sack with its lifesaving pillow, which I've been instructed to fetch and now have done. “No, it doesn't,” I say. “It's cold outside.”

“I guess your Sally's over there and seeing it firsthand, isn't she?” Ann regularly refers to Sally as
my
Sally as if there were hundreds of identical Sallys, and I just happen to have one. It could seem friendly but isn't. It makes Ann seem like my grandmother. “Those poor, poor people. They have nothing left. And they're paying property taxes on homes that've washed away. I'm lucky I'm not there anymore.”

“You
are
lucky.” Ann's living room's like a crisp stage set, and I feel too large to be in it. (Five minutes ago I felt too small.) I also feel like I don't smell good—like sweat or onions—and that my feet have cow shit on them and my hands are grimy. Ann was always a neatnik and has become more of one since she got Parkinson's and moved to smaller quarters. Feng Shui rules all here—promoting tastefully optimum
healing propensities. No metal lampshades (too
yang
). Tree energy wall colors—for calm. The bed, which I've never seen and never will, has its headboard oriented north to conquer insomnia (Ann's told me). What Feng Shui has on its mind about constipation, I don't know. The living room has a big mullioned picture window with a single candle facing the flood-lit woods and the duck pond (good
yin
). Tiny lights from the birch-bark canoe institute prickle invitingly through the tree limbs. The apartment looks like a model home in
The AARP Journal
. Pale green couch. Bamboo floors. Floral-print side chairs. Lots of clean, shining surfaces with plants, ceramic fragrant-liquid containers, and a fishless aquarium—small but new, and everything in its ordinal position to placate the gods by making the whole space as uncomfortable and un-lived-in as possible. I know there are also tiny soundless sensors all around. These track Ann's movements, tabulate her steps, record her heartbeats, check her blood pressure and brain functions, possibly digitize her relative empathy levels depending on stimuli—me in this case. Low. All are S.O.P. for the “Living Laboratory for Gray Americans Plan” she's opted for—and that drove down the purchase price. She can check any of these by accessing her “life profile” on the TV—though I can't see a TV. Ann was always a devotée of the Golf Channel. But golf on TV may be bad
yang
.

I set the crinkly pillow sack down on one of the floral
prints and am instantly sure I shouldn't. Pillows on chairs, plastic on textiles, plastic on
anything
conceivably dilutes the
chi
.

“Did you see Buck?” Ann closes the door with a clunk. Buck the flatfoot.

“I didn't,” I say, not entirely literally.

“He was wanting to brainstorm with you about buying on The Shore now that prices are whatever they are. Less, I guess now.”

“Less's not really the word for it. I retired from that line of work, though.” So much for those poor, poor people.

Ann presses her back to the closed door, hands behind her. She gives me a purposefully pained and thin smile. I'm irritable. I don't know why. “Do you real estate people ever really retire?”

“I'm not a ‘real estate people.' And we do. A lot in the last few years.”

Ann's wearing a soft, aqua-velour pants-and-top ensemble and a pair of day-glo orange Adidas that have never seen out-of-doors. Both, I assume, have the Feng Shui thumbs-up, as though she was a contemplated piece of furniture in her own living room. She's also accessorized using a gaudy gold-and-diamond teardrop necklace that husband number two picked up at Harry Winston back in the foggy past, and which she's brought out to remind me how women were once treated in a civilized world. Her hair, always athletically short, has been
even more severely cropped—into a kind of pixie that no longer hides the gray, and which I find unexpectedly appealing. Her whole affect has grown smaller, trimmer, more intense, just, it seems, since I last saw her—sized down near to the dimensions of her girlhood, when I met her in '69, and we listened to jazz and took the boat to see Miss Liberty and made whirlwind drives to Montauk and didn't think about jewelry, and had the time of our lives, which just never got better after that. Her skin is shiny though mottled, her facial bones more visible, her glacial blue eyes clear and strangely bright, and her once-soft nose gone beaky and sharpened, as if in concentration. Her breasts seem smaller. She's, in fact, prettier than I remember her, as if having a progressive, fatal disease agrees with her. Though there
is
the circular tremor ghosting her chin, the source of her concentration. It may be more pronounced than in November. She is brave to have me here, since I record the progress of her ailment like one of the sensors charting her decline from the prime that seemed always to be hers. Indeed, the whole Feng Shui deal, the velour, the Adidas, the bamboo, the floral prints, the necklace—they all speak of illness, the way an old-fashioned drawing room with damask draperies, shaded lamps, full bookshelves, and a fireplace speak to me of our first precious son being dead in the funeral parlor. The world gets smaller and more focused the longer we stay on it.

I'm still gazing round the over-cogitated room, wishing something would take place: a smoke alarm going off. The phone to ring. The figure of a Yeti striding through the snowy frame of the picture window, pausing to acknowledge us bestilled within, shaking his woolly head in wonder, then continuing into the forest where he's happiest. There's not even a Christmas tree here, nor a mirror. Rules restrict such things. Vanities.

Moments of bestillment are not unusual for Ann or me. What can I get from her, after all? What can she get from me? A pillow. (She could've easily purchased it online.) All we share is the click of reflex, a hammer falling on an empty chamber, like a desperado whose luck's run out.

“Has Clarissa told you about . . .” Ann begins to say.

But I'm struck by three things at once, none of which I've noticed before. There's not one photo anywhere—not the children, not Teddy, not her garrulous dad or sorrowing mom. Not me, natch. My face is recorded only in the grainy
capture
of some camera in the ceiling. The bedroom
might
have pictures. Or the bathroom. Speaking of which I could stand a leak, but won't be asking. Old Buck's Percheron comes uncomfortably to mind.

The second
presence
(the photos' absence is a presence) is the clutter of Christmas cards on the teak coffee table—also an issue of the
Carnage Clarion
, a copy of
USA Today
, and
underneath all, snugged out of disapproving Feng Shui sight, the silver shaft of a
putter!
Ann still engages in the Republican national pastime, tremor and all, with the bamboo carpet as her “green.” I wonder if she has the pop-up cup that ejects her ball each time she drains one. She used to.

The
Clarion
headline reads “Life in the Post-Antibiotic Era”—something we all need to be interested in. I wish I could see who's sending Christmas cards. Undoubtedly the inmates draw lots for who to befriend. Plus Haddam merchants tapping into the money trove a place like this betokens. I see a card with our son Paul Bascombe's return address in KC. 919 Dunmore—a name he loves. He “builds” his own cards with skills honed as an apprentice joke-meister at Hallmark. Mine this year bore a plain front, inside which was printed “An invisible man marries an invisible woman. Their kids are nothing to look at. Merry Xmas. Preston D. Service.” Ann's, I'm sure, is something different.