Let Me Be Frank With You (22 page)

“Doesn't sound right,” Eddie says. He coughs three shallow, staccato gaks, then gropes for a tissue from the box on the bed table. He gaks again and deposits something ungodly into a fold of the tissue, then wipes a bit of it back on his lips.
Probably he's ready to start in again about there being too few people dying, and how we need to do something about it pronto. He's still trying.

I hear Finesse in the next room. She's left the door open to keep tabs on us and is talking on her phone. “I thought he'd come up and get me, okay?” she's saying sternly. “I thought I knew him. But you can't ever think you know nobody. You know what I'm sayin'? I mean, if I'm s'posed to fuck a sixty-year-old man, it's damn sure gon' be my husband. Uh-huh.”

Eddie's gaze has wandered back to the TVs. One's tuned to evil-empire Fox. The other, to blandly see-it-your-way CNN. Fox has begun showing the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, where half the world is on the ice below a preposterously large and lighted Christmas tree. CNN's rehearsing last weekend's NFL offerings. My sudden fear is that Eddie's literary interest means he's about to hit me up to read something—something he's written—his own memoir, or a “novel” whose central character's an inventor named “Eric.” Once you publish a book, even a hundred years back and have lost the sight in both eyes, you're still fair game.

Finesse's big coifed head suddenly appears in the door from the seafaring room. She's holding her red cell phone in her hand. “You all still alive in there? You awful quiet.” She looks pityingly in at us. “I don't hear no laughin' and tellin' jokes. You ain't got all serious, have you?” She gives me a
mock-serious frown. “I don't want to have to give both you an enema. He done had his. My sister up in Newark says it's a big storm comin' on. I hope neither one of y'all's plannin' a Christmas trip.” I am. She disappears again.

“You know, they're not keeping me alive here, Frank,” Eddie says—hoarse, his voice strained and boyish. “Hospice doesn't do that. Life just happens or it doesn't. Bravery's not involved. It's interesting. Everybody ought to do it at least once.” Eddie's deviled, dyed-hair, Vaseline-smudged face looks shocked, as if he's trying to laugh again, but can only register alarm. “Oh,” he manages. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”

“Can I do anything for you, Eddie?” I've inched closer to his bedside but am not inclined to touch him.

“Like what?” Eddie croaks.

“An enema.”

Eddie's eyes snap at me. “You'd probably like it.”

“Not all of it,” I say. “Ole Olive. You've got yourself in a pickle here, haven't you?”

“Do you think so?” Eddie says, his parched lips curled.

Finesse laughs at something her sister in Newark has had to say. “I was never a good sleeper, anyway,” she says and laughs raucously.

Eddie takes a deep clattering breath. Each one of these could be his last. Eddie could pop off as dead as a mallet with me standing here pointless, hardly knowing him. “Mr.
Medley expired while joking with an unidentified man about enemas.”

Audible outside the house, across the soggy, puddly grounds of
casa
Eddie, comes the lonely
ping-ping-ping
and guttural heave 'n' hump of a heating oil truck. Skillman's—I've seen it when driving over. It's making a delivery, possibly to this very domicile. I hope my Sonata's not in the way when the driver starts backing up without looking.

“You know”—Eddie gulps hard and dry and thin—“all this shit you think you can't live with. Colostomy bag. Vegetative state. Commandant at Bergen-Belsen. You can live with anything. The mind just goes back to a previous state.”

“Maybe
that's
enough clarity,” I say, beside his bed.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Eddie breathes again almost easily. For a moment, he seems less under subversive attack, as if his brain had struck a truce with his body's assailants. Maybe my being here is a benefaction. A very bad smell now escapes from under Eddie's covers. No telling what. “What I can't live with—it's awful to say. Awful to
know
. I realize I won't ever pass a woman in a revolving door and have her look at me in that way. You know? That's over. It's shameful to say that. Every productive thing I ever did came from that feeling. I know it about myself.” Eddie fiddles up under his sheet with the hand not tubed up to the drip bag. “Ohhhh,” he moans and averts his face in recognition of whatever he's come into contact with
down there. A catheter or some equally monstrous intrusion on his person. So many things can go wrong, it's strange any go right. I'm thinking maybe two miniature Vietnamese masseuses—a mercy flight from KumWow—might offer Eddie a better send-off than I'm managing; affirm his faith that life happens 'til it doesn't. Finesse wouldn't mind.

“It's not shameful, Eddie,” I say, relative to the origin of his species. “Everything comes from someplace.”

“I have to tell you something, Frank,” Eddie says quickly, his chest expanding under his blue sheet, as if he's trying to suppress a new onslaught.

“That's what I'm here for.” Not literally true. Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence. Death makes of everything in life a dream.

“I have to get this out of my head. I don't want to die being driven crazy by it. I might as well not die.”

“Give me your worst, Eddie.” Wise to keep all responses to a minimum. Locate my Default Self. It doesn't matter what I say anyway. Eddie and I are of one mind—life is a matter of subtractions.

Finesse again leans into the doorway, gives us another look of worried but mock disapproval. “Y'all ain't no fun.” She fattens her cheeks as if she's disgusted. Eddie and I might as well be one person.

“I fucked Ann.” Eddie's staring straight up—fiercely—out
of his vanquished, soon-to-be-untenanted body, his ghastly beady eyes unblinking behind his specs, in their hollow, bony sockets, the tops of which have black hair-dye encroaching.

At least, I
believe
that's what Eddie's just said. His stricken face indicates he
thinks
he said something important.

“What?” I could've heard him wrong. Neither of us is talking very loud. Then in case I'm right, I say,
“When?”

Eddie lets go with an immense cough—a bottom scraper. This time he covers his mouth and emits a groan. For a moment he seems incapable of speaking and purses his gunked lips like a zipper.

“What?” I say again, still not very loud, but pushing in a little closer.

Eddie clears his throat and makes an awful gasping-gurgling noise, then very fast says, “You-were-away-teaching-someplace-in-Mass. It-wasn't-that-long-after-your-son-died-she-was-alone—Jalina-had-left. Uhhhhgh. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I was careless.”

“What?” I say a third time. “When I was . . . teaching? You fucked Ann?” A pause. “My Ann?” Another pause. “Why'd you do that?”

It isn't so much I'm saying these words as much as they're being vocalized
through
me. I hear them when Eddie does.

“I can't put the genie back in the bottle now, Frank.” Eddie gulps, then gurgles, then averts his head as if he wants
to recede into the deathly air, like the specter he'll soon be. Outside, the Skillman Oil truck's commencing its large liquid infusion. Durning, durning, durning, through the house pipes, into a cast receptacle. “I fell in love with her, Frank,” Eddie's strangled voice manages, his monkey face still staring away. “I wanted her to live with me in France. In Deauville. Take her on my boat. She said no. She loved you. I don't want to die with that deception as my legacy. I'm so sorry.” Eddie heaves. Pain, sob—what's the difference?

“Why . . .” I'm about to say something I'm not really sure about the nature of.
Why
have you told me this?
Why
should I believe you?
Why
would this come up now—when your last breaths are prizable and should be saved for prizable utterances?
Why
would I want to hear this? I'm looking down at poor Eddie. What my face portrays I don't know. What
should
it portray? It's possible I have no words or feelings for what Eddie's just told me. Which is satisfactory.

“You-two-were-almost-divorced, Frank,” Eddie says speedily, as if my hands were around his neck. They aren't.

“Well,” I say, and pause and think a moment, back through the years. “That's not exactly true, Eddie.” I am immensely, imperturbably calm. A calm with few words. “We
did
get divorced. That's true. But we weren't
almost
divorced. We were married. That's the wrong order. Time goes the other way. Or it used to.”

“I know,” Eddie croaks. “You and I didn't know each other that well, Frank.” Again, the clattery, clunking fireplace-grate noises deep in Eddie's breathing machinery—unidentifiable except as fatal.

“No,” I say. No, that's right. No, you're wrong. No, perhaps now's the time for your last breath.

I have recently developed a tiny groove in the rear of my lower right canine, something my night guard should protect me against but of course doesn't. My tongue finds it now and scours it until there's a leakage of rich tongue blood I can taste. I also feel slight pelvic-pain heat below-decks. I'd like to get the fuck out of here; maybe stand outside and have a word in the driveway with Ezekiel Lewis, driver of the Skillman truck and scion of a long line of Haddam Lewises, stretching beyond last century's mists, when their great-great-grandfather Stand-Off Lewis came up from Dixie accompanying a stalwart young white seminarian as his valet. And, naturally, stayed. I once employed Ezekiel's father, Wardell, when I was in the realty business. They are our heritage here. We are their spoiled legacy. If I had one black friend in town, him or her I'd keep. There'd be plenty of laughing involved. Not this kind of tired, tiresome, unhappy, deathbed shit I'm putting up with at the moment. White people's shit. No wonder we're disappearing. We're over-bred. Our genie's out of its bottle.

“Tell me what you think of me, Frank.” Eddie's regard wants to come back to me, but gets claimed by the two TVs high on the wall. Fox has loser Romney, addressing a convention of habited nuns, beaming as if he'd just won something. CNN has a smiling Andy Williams, who, it seems, has sadly died. Both—dead and alive—seek our approval.

But is this all that life comes down to when you take away damn near everything? What do you think of me? Tell me, tell me,
tell me!
My wife said the same thing to me just days ago. It must be grief not to know.

“It doesn't change anything, Olive,” I say, not sure what I could mean by that. It's just the truest thing I can say. Maybe Eddie would like me to give him a punch in the nose on his deathbed. (What would Finesse think of
that
?) But I'm not mad—at anyone. A wound you don't feel is not a wound. Time fixes things, mostly.

“I'm an insomniac, Frank,” Eddie says and coughs shallowly, fading eyes still on the TVs—which one I can't be sure. Mitt or Andy. “Things get in my head and won't go away.”

“Most insomniacs sleep more than they think they do, Eddie.” I take a step back from his bed. I'm departing. We both are.

Eddie's cell phone on the bed starts ringing with a tune.
What good is sit-ting a-lone in your room, come hear the muuu
sic
play . . 
.

“I'm dying and the fucking phone rings,” Eddie says, his wraith's hand clutching, fumbling through the bedclothes. He smiles at me gratefully, venomously. “Lemme get this. If I can. Sorry.” He gasps and squeezes his weary eyes shut to be able to speak.

“Go for it, Olive.” I raise my hand like an Indian brave.

“Eddie Medley,” I hear him say, hoarse, high-pitched, evanescent. “Who's this? Hello!”

Start by ad-mit-ting from crad-le to tomb is-n't that long a stay . . 
.

I'm gone.

O
UTSIDE, IN LATE
-D
ECEMBER LATE
-
MORNING SPRING
, it's hard to believe that in one day's time all will be white and Christmas-y, and I will be on a sentimental journey to the nation's midsection. My son and I will have some laughs, crack some corny jokes, see a great river and the Great Plains' commencement, eat some top KC sirloin, possibly visit Hallmark and the house of Thomas Hart Benton (a favorite of mine), and talk long into the night about rent-to-own. If I can only get there.

The two scolding crows have exited their branch in the beech tree. I hear them not far away in another yard, other things on their minds. Given all, I'm feeling surprisingly
good about this day, with much of it still to come. The taste of blood in my mouth has vanished.

“
All
right now,
all
right . . .” A voice I know—Ezekiel's—coming round the side of Eddie's deteriorating house, ready to slide the fuel bill under the door, as he does at my house. “. . . Christmas gift!” he sings out and smiles at me as if I'm a fixture out here on the pea gravel, no different from the Henry Moore bronze.

“Christmas gift,” I say back in the old southern way. Though he's as Jersey as they come. Ezekiel is a strapping, smiling, shaved-head, spiritual dynamo in his green Skillman jumpsuit. We “go back” without having to know each other all that well or be friends. White southerners all think we “know” Negroes better than we do or could. They may think they know us, too—with better reason. Ezekiel, though, is good on any scale of human goodness. He is thirty-nine, attends the AME Tabernacle over in the black trace, coaches wrestling at the Y, teaches Sunday School, volunteers at the food bank. His wife, Be'ahtrice, teaches high school math and knows the universal sign language. He is bedrock. The best we have to offer.