Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (42 page)

In the kitchen, she put the last two Pop-Tarts in the box into the toaster. Two minutes later, the Pop-Tarts shot up. She buttered them quickly and put the knife in the sink. On her way back to the couch, she spotted the napkin that had blown off the coffee table. She thought about picking it up, but left it on the floor. She plopped down on the couch and took a bite from one of her Pop-Tarts.

Carol Bowen-Smith, the activities director of We Care, kept stressing how well prepared the facility was to deal with stroke victims. “To We Care, you're an alive person. Very alive,” she said, patting Green on the head. “And taking care of living people is something we strive to do well.” She turned to Mary. “We take the residents to vote. And on Sundays, we organize church outings.” Green didn't like Carol one bit—the way she patted him
on the head, the way she smiled at him, the way she kept saying things to Mary like he wasn't sitting right in goddamn front of them. From his wheelchair, he looked up at Mary and shot her a scowl. Without taking her eyes off of Carol Bowen-Smith, Mary plopped her meaty, sweaty, adultery-committing hand on his shoulder, like a hand on the shoulder was supposed to soothe him when she wanted to stow him away in some old folks' home so that she could sashay about with her goddamn Cadillac-driving boyfriend. Well, she was going to see. Green Geneseo wasn't a guy who rolled over.

When they got to the indoor pool, Carol talked about the Saturday morning “Stroke Swimmers”—of which she was the coach—her awful voice echoing off the block walls and reverberating around the room as she raved about how We Care kept the pool water at a “balmy but refreshing” eighty degrees. Eighty degrees? Back in Las Vegas, Green used to keep the above-ground pool behind the trailer set at sixty-five, and during the dead of summer, that was about as refreshing as a warm puddle. Carol then told Mary about the monthly Hawaiian luau, where the residents gathered around the pool to listen to Lou's Luauers, a steel drum group made up of retired high school music teachers from Peoria. “We Care is so much more than a nursing home. It's a way of life,” Carol said, pointing out a fake palm tree, which was leaning dangerously close to the pool. She smiled. “I like to think of us as a nursing resort. Nursing home sounds so . . . I don't know . . . boring.” Mary just kept nodding like her damn head was on a spring. Suddenly, Green's attention was drawn to the door behind the wilting, fake palm tree, where an old man was cupping his face in the glass. Green tried to get a better look, but the guy ducked out of sight as soon as Carol turned around to lead them to the next destination on their tour.

Down a hallway, past an alcove with a pay phone and some vending machines, past a set of double doors that Carol pointed out was the cafeteria, past the nurses' station where a nurse, who
Carol didn't bother to introduce, played solitaire on a computer, they stopped in front of a closed door. Room 148. Carol pushed open the door and stepped aside so that Green and Mary could take it all in. To Green, the room looked like a regular hospital room, only a little larger. There were two beds with a nightstand separating them. The floor was covered in industrial tile and there were medical contraptions—blood-pressure cuff, oxygen nozzle—on the wall behind the beds. A television was affixed to the wall opposite the beds. In the corner was a table with a bouquet of plastic flowers in a glass vase.

“Your roommate will be Leroy Midge,” Carol said, pointing to an ancient man in the bed farthest from the door. He wore a flannel shirt and red suspenders and was reading a book. A can of soda with a straw sat on the nightstand beside him. “Leroy is deaf,” Carol said. “It's an advantage to have a hearing impaired roommate. Although, Ms. Geneseo, mandatory quiet time is nine o'clock.” Carol then walked over to the window and threw open the drapes, offering a view of a cornfield and a Dumpster overflowing with garbage bags. “City garbage collectors come once a week,” Carol said, quickly shutting the drapes.

Their final stop was the cafeteria. Mary pushed Green to a table, and then she and Carol got in line behind a cluster of nurses. It was only eleven in the morning, but the cafeteria was already full of fragile, zombie-like old people. At a table by the salad bar, a male nurse was feeding a resident cottage cheese. In the back corner, three residents, two in wheelchairs, drank mugs of coffee. The guy Green had seen spying on them at the pool was sitting at a table by himself. A green duffel bag was next to his tray. He was writing in a notebook. The guy glanced up and met Green's stare. His eyes were piercing, but Green couldn't look away. He was, for some reason, scared of this guy, even though he was thin and skeletal, like a tree without its leaves. He was wearing a stained v-neck undershirt, and deep lines of weariness were etched in his face. And, strangely, he was wearing a black beret.

Chic was all set to do his business. The bathroom door was locked, and he'd just squirted a tablespoon of hand lotion into his palm. Diane was in the living room on the Airdyne bike—a recent and obsessive habit. She cranked up the volume on the radio so that she could hear Dr. Peale and spent half an hour at least, four times a day, perched on the bike's saddle, pedaling and sweating while eating Pop-Tarts or ice cream or whatever happened to be in the kitchen. He tried to block the noise out as he unbuckled his belt and slid his pants down to his ankles. He lifted up the toilet lid and focused on his fantasy: him and Diane in their honeymoon room at the Seashell Inn. Who cared if he didn't remember it correctly? This was the way he wanted it to go; the way it should have gone. If he ever got the chance again, he'd make sure it went this way. He'd tug off Diane's pants and lay her down on the bed. He'd kiss the bottoms of her feet. He'd kiss a trail up her calves and thighs.

For some reason, the fantasy wasn't working today. He squirted more lotion into his palm. He closed his eyes. His thoughts raced: he was a fifty-five-year-old man masturbating in the bathroom while his wife rode an exercise bike in the next room. He shook that thought out of his head and focused on Diane at the Seashell Inn, wearing nothing but a bra, lying on her back, him holding her leg as he kissed her inner thigh. This wasn't really doing it for him, either. He wanted Diane the girl who had just graduated from high school, not the overweight woman in the living room. More lotion. He closed his eyes, but had a difficult time ushering the young Diane into his imagination. To compensate, he focused on someone more readily available: the actress on
The Love Boat
, Lauren something or other. She was cute
and young, with reddish hair and a high-pitched girlish giggle. They were on the Love Boat, in a cabin, and Lauren was on her back, and Chic was kissing a trail down her thigh. Actually, no, they were at the Seashell Inn. Then, from out in the living room, Chic heard a thud. He stopped rubbing his penis, and looked at the closed bathroom door. It sounded like something had fallen, or jumped. Maybe Diane had gotten off the exercise bike—the whooshing of the wheels had stopped. Maybe she was getting a glass of water. Actually, she might knock on the door. He'd been in the bathroom for nearly fifteen minutes. He had to hurry. He went for it. He was close . . . the top of his head tingled, and he ejaculated into the toilet. A wave of relief passed over him, and his right leg twitched. After a minute, he pulled up his pants, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands. He looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted the collar of his shirt. He unlocked the bathroom door.

Out in the living room, Diane was lying on the carpet, facedown. In one hand, she clutched a spoon; next to her hand was an overturned bowl of ice cream. At first, the scene didn't register. Then, he remembered the thud. Oh, my God. She's . . . Is she . . . He remembered Diane coming up the bleachers at the football game all those years ago. He kneeled down next to her and rolled her over. Her eyes were open, and she had chocolate ice cream smeared above her upper lip. He stared into her eyes. They were hollow and vacant. He remembered her at the bowling alley, standing at the mouth of the lane, holding her ball, her back to him and the group, and he remembered how, sometimes, when she stood there holding the ball and sizing up the pins, she sometimes, to make the group laugh, would wiggle her behind, and after she did that, while everyone snickered, she would glance over her shoulder, and when she glanced over her shoulder, it occurred to Chic, at that moment while he kneeled next to his dead wife, that she was looking at him to see if he was laughing at her joke. He put two fingers on her neck, but he knew he wasn't going
to get a pulse. He slipped the spoon out of her hand and put it on the coffee table. There had been a half scoop of ice cream left in the bowl, and it was mounded on the carpet. He went to the kitchen to get a rag. He wiped the chocolate from her mouth and cleaned up the melting ice cream on the carpet. He took the bowl and rag to the kitchen. He rinsed the bowl and wrung out the rag. Then, he sat down on the couch and looked at his wife on the floor, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling. He had known this was going to happen someday, but here, right now, was that day. It was happening. It had happened. He looked up and noticed a crack in the ceiling, a long thin crack. He'd seen it before. He got up and tried to look more closely at it. It spanned the entire ceiling. He had no idea what had caused it. Then, he felt . . . he couldn't really explain it. He felt bad. Guilty, maybe. Ashamed might be better. He'd been in the bathroom masturbating when his wife died. He'd have to make up a story. He'd been in the garage. No, at the store. That was better. He had been at Stafford's and come into the house and there she was. What if she'd felt her chest tighten and called for him. Jesus, he hoped that wasn't the case. Imagine that. She was clutching her chest and trying to cry out for help, and he's in the bathroom, rubbing his penis. He kneeled down next to her and crossed her hands on her stomach. She looked peaceful; at least, she looked peaceful. He leaned over her, looking down on her face, into her vacant eyes. “If you called for me, and I didn't hear you, I'm sorry,” he said. He knew he needed to say more. “If you can hear me, I love you. Or, I thought I loved you. I once loved you. There was love there, I think. I don't know what happened to it. You loved me, or you once did, or I think you did. Maybe you did. I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. If you called for me, and I didn't hear you, I'm sorry.” He bent down and closed her eyes and kissed her forehead. Then he got up and stepped over the body and went into the kitchen and picked up the telephone.

Along with her will, Diane had left two items in her safety deposit box at Middleville Community Bank. One was the copy of Chic's poetry chapbook that she had bought at Stafford's. In the margins, Diane had written things like: Interesting,” “Good,” and “I've felt this way, too.” Chic wished she had said something to him about his poetry. Maybe if she had mentioned how much she liked his poems, he would have written a second chapbook. Or a third. Maybe he'd be teaching poetry classes at the library. Maybe he'd be reading poems to her right now, instead of sitting in the bank parking lot.