Playland (4 page)
That’s exactly how it happened.
More or less.
I thought, What if Lizzie had died of a lingering illness and not in an automobile accident? A lingering death gives both the victim and the survivors time to prepare, to put on a serious courageous face, to define grace under pressure. So long, it goes without saying, as death was not postponed for such an inordinate period of time that friends and family got bored with the idea and began finding excuses not to visit the patient with their offerings of succor and praise. And after a while left for the weekend without giving a number where they could be reached in the event of the inevitable. Time enough to read about it on the obituary page, society’s scorecard, and mull the reasons why the deceased appeared below the fold, or without a photograph.
A reasonable time frame, then. Something out of a movie. People dying in movies did not have catheters inserted into their urethras. Nor did they have dementia. And no drooling and no incontinence and no shit on the sheets, those crosses of the terminal illness. Six weeks. A strain, but not too much. Time to remember Lizzie’s virtues and gloss over her faults. Which of course were so few they did not bear mentioning, except to elucidate that she was not perfect, but then who was? How is
she, Jack? I hope when I go, he would answer, that I show as much … and his voice would trail off. Jack is really bearing up well, people would say.
What kind of six-week terminal illness then? Lizzie’s last mammogram showed her breasts to be fibrocystic, but the only mass was a benign cyst that the oncologist aspirated in his office. But what if the lump had not been benign. Breast cancer, detected late. A CAT scan and a spinal tap. A small locus of the renegade cells had taken residence in the meninges. No. The liver. The liver does not regenerate. An operation was out of the question, the oncologist would have said. Let him be a cancer bureaucrat, and be affected with the professional coldness of the breed. Just vamping now. Lizzie would ask to see him, a half hour of his time to let him explain all the options she had available, and to let her put into words all the fears that were rattling around in her imagination.
“I have sixty patients,” he would say to her coldly. “I am a very busy man, and if you think I have a half hour to discuss your case alone with you, I suggest you get another doctor.”
No. No doctor would ever say that. On the other hand, a deathbed speech was always good value.
“Dr. Korn,” Lizzie would say (a perfect name, Korn, Bernard Korn, M.D., P.C., file that), “we are discussing cancer, and with it the possibility of my death.” Of course this was not the way Lizzie talked, even at the end, when we were only speaking monosyllabically. Her style ran in the direction of, You know, it’s been ten days since we fucked. Not accusingly. A statement of fact.
Back to the plot line.
“I have always been terrified of cancer,” Lizzie would say, “because I have always been terrified of death. I believe in certainties and death is the great unknown. I hate unknowns. To you I am a patient, an abstraction. A humanoid, not a human being. One does not have a half hour to discuss fear and death with a humanoid. The humanoid should get another doctor. So be it. You are hereby dismissed as my doctor.” Could she have
ever talked in that way? No. But it plays. “I do not wish you ill. I only hope that when you are forced to confront your own death that you will be frightened, as frightened as I am now, and that you are alone. That is perhaps sentimental of me. I do not care. Please leave.”
It needs work, Jack thought, but it has possibilities. Cut from, “You are hereby dismissed as my doctor” to “Please, leave.”
Oh, Christ, Lizzie, it would have been a better way to go.
“You ever think of therapy, kid?” Marty Magnin asked. Marty was a movie producer with whom I had worked off and on for over twenty years. He called me kid and he called me pal, and in a way I guess we were pals. Or what passed for pals in Hollywood. Lizzie never could stand him.
“No, Marty, why?” I said.
If it had to be an accident, this one might have been better:
When I walked into the TWA terminal, the notation next to Lizzie’s flight number on the Arrivals monitor said, “See Agent.” I turned around and left the building immediately, not knowing exactly why I had to see the agent, but knowing I would find out on the car radio soon enough. I had seen the scene too often on television—the minicam holding on “See Agent,” then the cut to the special room the airline had set aside for the people who had come to the airport to pick up those loved ones who would never arrive. The grief managers would move in, and strangers would hug each other, and promise to keep in touch, and the airline would try to get us to sign release forms. I even knew how much the figure was—$75,000, and an agreement not to sue.
The accident was in February. In March I began to write letters to public figures:
Hon. Clifton Mayo
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Mayo,
On Saturday last, I saw you and a young woman in a mink coat who I would hope was your wife, although she did not look like your wife’s photographs, checking into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Later that same evening, I happened by coincidence to be dining at Michael’s Restaurant in Santa Monica and saw you sign the check for a party of eight. There were by my count four bottles of Cristal Roederer champagne consumed at your table. According to the sommelier, the Cristal Roederer was of the 1979 vintage and is listed at $125.00 per bottle. As I am not aware of any Senate business that was being conducted in Los Angeles that weekend, and as you are an elected representative of the people of Utah, I would like to think that you were not staying at the most expensive hotel in Beverly Hills on the public tit, nor that you charged the taxpayers of America for a $1,400 private dinner with French champagne when the domestic wine industry is currently in such difficult straits.
I look forward to your prompt reply.
John Broderick
“He’s not really a shrink,” Marty Magnin said. “He’s what they call a psychological counselor.”
“Who?”
“Say again?”
“Who calls him a psychological counselor?”
“Everybody. Morty Wishengrad swears by him.”
“Morty Wishengrad’s an agent. You’re taking testimonials from agents now?”
“I’m just saying you got to get over this Lizzie thing.”
“What Lizzie thing is that, Marty?”
“Jack, she’s dead.”
“I know. I saw her on the monitor.”
“Jack, you need help.”
“I’m moving, Marty. Picking up stakes. Leaving Cheyenne.”
“You live in Brentwood, for Christ’s sake.”
“Marty, did you know that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’?”
I
found a nine-month sublet on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. A landmark building, the real estate woman said. “A City Home for People with Country Houses” was its advertising slogan when it opened its doors in 1909, the smallest apartment having seventeen rooms. The real estate woman had that nervous conversational tic that did not allow for dead air. Woody Allen used the exterior in
Hannah and Her Sisters
, it’s one of his favorite buildings in New York, that’s high praise, no one knows New York like Woody, you must know him, you’re a screenwriter, it’s such a small world, isn’t it, Mark Hampton decorated it, he doesn’t do many apartments on the West Side, I love chocolate cut velvet, don’t you? No, not really, but the apartment had good space, four and a half rooms, two baths, twelve-foot ceilings, original moldings, and I didn’t have the heart to look at any of the other buildings on her list, or, more to the point, the will to listen to any more of her irrelevancies.
“So how are you, kid?” Marty Magnin said. Every other Monday I was on his list of calls. Marty kept in touch with me as he kept in touch with his broker and his bookie. His telephone
had twelve buttons and speed dial. I was not on speed dial. “Getting much?”
“Enough.” Meaning none at all.
“You working?”