My Little Blue Dress (16 page)

Besides, I don't actually see any of the money until I finish. Most authors who sign big contracts get some of the cash upfront, to sustain them as they write the book, but not, apparently, when they're over a hundred years old. As a centenarian and a first-time author I have apparently been deemed too much of a risk by the publisher's accountants. I'll see a penny when I finish, and not before.

If that weren't insulting enough, there is also Clause Eleven of my contract, which appeared to me to have been typed in hastily at a slight diagonal:

Author shall additionally provide Publisher with such keys and/or passwords and/or instructions as are necessary for Publisher to gain entry to Author's residence at 133 Eldridge St., Apt. 4, on delivery date (see Paragraph 2) for the purpose of assessing the condition of the Manuscript.

By which they mean: for the purpose of stepping over my desiccated corpse and whisking away whatever fragments of memoir I've managed to generate to be completed by a snickering team of recently graduated ghostwriters and subsequently published as if I'd written it myself.

Did I sign this morbid and insulting document? Yep. Of course I did. The money was just unignorable, but as a petty gesture of defiance I keep this manuscript hidden down the
side of my bed. If I do—as I hope to—die before completing this work, then when the publishers come round to collect it they're fucking well going to have to hunt around.

June 9th—Wednesday

I haven't told you about Bruno's job, and I should.

Every evening between six and seven Bruno Maddox participates on a news discussion program called
Thirty UN!der Thirty
, and if the TV is tuned to channel 79 when he leaves for work, then I get to watch him.

It isn't a very
good
television program
Thirty UN!der Thirty
. The premise is fairly basic—a panel of young people from around the nation arguing about the issues behind that day's headlines—but in order to justify the show's snappy title there are
thirty
of them, all sharing the screen at the same time. If you find this hard to imagine then you might want to try cutting thirty little faces out of a magazine and pasting them to the front of your television set, if you can fit them all in. Done it? Okay. Now imagine them all talking and scoffing and interrupting each other and occasionally making gagging gestures . . . It's overwhelming.

“Bruno Maddox in New York” broadcasts from a wooden platform some forty feet above the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange. When he makes his daily contribution—you have to make at least one comment or you can get fired—his box swells up three times its normal size and you get to see the huge vaulted room behind him with its gilded, super-ornate ceiling and these great metal towers of dusty computer screens and old stained 'phones.

The wooden platform is the Manhattan headquarters of
what I think may be the world's smallest twenty-four-hour cable news station, Channel N! The giant N! basically stands for “news,” but if you actually tune in to channel 79 here in Manhattan, depending on what time of day it is you will see the N! doing duty either as the first letter of
N!ewsdesk
(7
A
.
M
. to 6
P
.
M
.); or of
N!ow and Then
(7
P
.
M
. to midnight); or
N!eal Roddenberry, Horseman of Controversy
(midnight to 3
A
.
M
.); or, between six and seven in the evening, bulging in the middle of
Thirty UN!der Thirty
.

The money isn't spectacular as you can imagine but in a lot of other ways
Thirty UN!der Thirty
is the perfect job for a caregiver. It only takes an hour a day, you don't need to have your wits about you and in Bruno's case he gets to walk to work, which I imagine must be fairly therapeutic. Ambling over to the Bowery in the early evening air, slicing southward through the hordes of Chinese into the spaciousness of Tribeca, then into the financial district, beating a path against the thin tide of secretaries and messengers limping slowly uptown in pursuit of their banker masters who are already nestled in the upholstery of their limos and spaceships and helicopters, and finally reaching shady Trinity Place. Exactly how he gets from the door of the American Stock Exchange to the floodlit wooden platform forty feet above the trading floor that is N!'s Manhattan studio I do not know, but waiting for him there, I've deduced, is Mark Clark, the small, hairy technician who has Bruno's earpiece and microphone already wired up and ready to go.

The broadcast lasts until seven and at seven-thirty he is back here, dinner dangling at his side in a white plastic bag. I have to be very careful about what I eat because I have a stomach condition called “diverticulitis”—very
common among the elderly—that involves little pouches of intestinal lining bulging out into the main thoroughfare of the bowel and snagging chunks of fecal matter as they try to squeeze past, if you can imagine such a thing. The pain can be unbelievable and the only real cure is surgery, though symptoms can be kept in abeyance by following a high-fiber diet and avoiding all nuts and seeds. This evening's dinner was rigatoni with vodka sauce from a place in Little Italy: an excellent and very compassionate selection on the part of the boy.

I think I mentioned that he is an inherently good man.

June 10th—Thursday

The heat is becoming absurd. Reader, you should have seen the map of the United States the TV weatherwoman was standing in front of this morning. I'd never seen such infernal colors: horrible hellish purples and reds and oranges, like someone's terrible sweater, no pun intended—none taken, conceivably, I suppose.

It's getting really hot. Hot and nasty.

June 11th—Friday

A quiet, hot, nasty day. Bruno bought a rattly old fan from the madman vendor. The boy and I watched a documentary about two old friends reuniting decades after the drunk-driving accident that paralyzed one and left the other feeling guilty.

That's a lot like us
, I pulsed Bruno.
You're the cripple
and I'm the perpetrator
. But he was looking out the window, lost in thought, or in lack of thought, with his eyes pointed vaguely at the gummed-up ventilation fan of the tenement across the street.
You should kill me,
I added as an afterthought.

June 12th—Saturday

Another day. More dolor.

I'd tell you about it but it's just too depressing.

June 13th—Sunday

Okay, stop the presses. Something has happened.

Something weird.

In fact, “Can I tell you something weird?” were Bruno's precise words to me this afternoon as he returned from his daily grocery run
without any groceries.
“I was in the Kam Wo just now getting some beer . . .”

Okay,
I pulsed. The Kam Wo Trading Company is one of those poky little Chinese shops where they sell medicinal herbs and great bushels of chopsticks and knobbled bedroom slippers with therapeutic magnets in the soles. The Kam Wo also sells beer, from a fridge in the rear.
Do go on
.

“. . . and I ran into this girl. This girl I know who works for a magazine. I went out for a drink with her a few weeks ago . . .”

Uh oh, I thought. Not her again.

“Anyway she was there in one of the aisles, wearing rubber surgical gloves . . .” he absently held up a hand and wiggled the fingers, “. . . looking at some sort of dried
root
. I went up and said hi. Then
she
said hi. And then . . .” he frowned, well, then I just started
mumbling
. I've been mumbling a lot for some reason these last few weeks, just . . . everywhere I go, in shops and places, I've been having a hard time . . . making myself understood. Anyway I started mumbling to this girl about how
sorry
I was for having called her up drunk the other week and also for the other week when we were having a drink and I . . . I told her I wanted to live in an undersea dome and then just . . . left. Anyway I think I must have mumbled something about how I haven't been myself lately and how if she only had a chance to hang out with me for a while, a couple of weeks or something, she'd see that I was actually not the complete freak I might appear because
she
suddenly then said, ‘Is that how they do things in England?' And I said, ‘Is that how they do what in England?' and she said . . . I think she was smirking . . . she said, ‘Is that how people date each other in England? You try them out for two weeks to see if you like them?' And I had no idea what she was talking about and so I just mumbled, ‘Um . . . yes. Especially in rural areas . . . ' I didn't mean it but she suddenly then said, ‘Okay.' And I said, ‘Okay what?' And she said, and she wasn't smirking anymore, she just said, ‘I'm not going to sleep with you but I can handle two weeks. Call me tomorrow at work,' and she gave me her number.” Unfolding his fingers, Bruno revealed something whose picture could literally have appeared in a dictionary next to the phrase, “slip of paper”: a slim, perfect rectangle of paper inscribed with seven neat digits, hyphen after the
third, and above them the words “Hayley Iskender, come hither.”
*

We both stared at the slip of paper.

That is weird,
I pulsed.
I tell you this city's full of complete nut
 . . .

But the young man was no longer reachable. He was down on his stomach in the kitchen, scrubbing with a sponge-stick at the grime between the stove and the refrigerator.

You're not actually going to call her, are you?
I pulsed him when he stood to survey his work.
Bru
 . . .

But he was busy filling a bucket with hot water and detergent and was now tackling our filthy windows. I pretty much had my answer, I reckoned, and by the time dinner arrived—a can of black bean soup that has been in the cupboard for ages, garnished with specially purchased sour cream and served with a napkin that had been twirled into a decorative cone—I definitely had my answer.

Yes.

He's going to call her.

And that makes me apprehensive.

Why?

Well, for several reasons. Let me quote to you again from Dr. Steven Hearne:

Regular breaks and excursions may be the caregiver's best weapon against burnout, but the temptation to start a “second life” outside the Home should be resisted at all costs. Contact with
noncaregivers may seem an obvious antidote to a deepening sense of isolation but in practice even something as simple as a weekly “card night” can be brutally demoralizing, as the caregiver finds herself reminded at every turn of how much of normal life—staying out late, overindulging—is now off limits to her, and of how little she has in common with people she used to know. Old friends can seem like strangers, and starting a new relationship is all but impossible.

“All but impossible,” says Dr. Hearne, who has a Ph.D. in science, and that's under the
best
of circumstances, which you'd have to be a moron to think these were. Bruno Maddox can't function in social situations because he's a caregiver. “Hayley Iskender,” if not clinically insane—having on the one hand instructed Bruno that she didn't want to see him again and on the other just agreed to be his girlfriend for two weeks—would appear at least to be dangerously impulsive. Their conversation this morning in Kam Wo Trading Company was premised on a massive misunderstanding—more a lie, really—about Anglo-Saxon mating rituals and if all that wasn't enough we're in the middle of a heat wave.

Bad feelings are the only sort of feelings you have when you get to be my age, reader.

June 14th—Monday

As predicted, Bruno did call this “Hayley Iskender” around elevenish this morning. His vocal performance was a little shaky, the inaudibility percentage rather high, but he
successfully made no mention of undersea domes and came away from the conversation with instructions to meet her this evening at a fashionable-sounding place called Toast, about which, being an old woman, I know nothing.

Looking neither uplifted nor apprehensive Bruno threw himself into a full day's caregiving. Everything went normally. Meals were served. I didn't die. At five he dressed for work without any extra primping and in the same clothes as ever, the green suit, the white shirt, and had the foresight to serve me a bowl of split pea soup and a cup of water before running the usual hand through his hair and disappearing.

He just came back a few minutes ago, at the stroke of ten o'clock—a little early, perhaps, but not unduly so—and if he was suffering he didn't show it. Seemed a little tired maybe, but change is always tiring, even good change.

So maybe I'm wrong and it all went fine.

June 15th—Tuesday

I have a few little pellets of info for you today, none of them particularly telling, and all of them, I'm afraid, rather discouraging.

For instance, I am writing these words at twenty-five minutes past
nine
in the evening and Bruno Maddox is already back from the second night of his probationary relationship with that strange girl from the Kam Wo. That means he was with her, and he didn't seem well just now during the trip back to my bedroom. He kept clearing his throat and sniffing in a way that recalled for me
precisely
the way I used to feel myself after one of those intolerable
evenings spent trying to have romantic conversations with Davey McCracken back in 1913. I remember that feeling very well. It was a very bad feeling.