Two or three times a week, I would go over to Mal’s. Felicity was banned from his apartment, so it was clear that our friendship had taken on another dimension: not socializing, but a tentative form of caretaking. It was as if my assuming Felicity’s care had been a dry run for my taking on, more gradually, Mal’s. To speak of this explicitly would have been too awkward for either of us, but one task at a time—carting out laundry, shopping, making photocopies, renting the occasional film—I quietly assumed the more banal aspects of his upkeep. To see Felicity, he still came by the shop, but dinner at my flat was rare now; Mal’s two flights of stairs were labor enough without mine.
One day in July, I was unpacking a shipment of books after-hours when Ralph came into the shop. In the last week, I had refused two dinner invitations, and I knew he felt slighted. But that day, without so much as a greeting, he said, “So, are you fucking him?”
Wondering what spy could have reported on my mornings with Tony, I felt my face redden and kept it aimed down at a carton of guides to the birds of North America.
“Are you fucking our little critic? Is this why your glands are so patently aglow?” he said. “I ask because your welfare concerns me.” This he said more gently, like the ideal father I no longer wanted him to be.
I straightened up and looked at him coldly. “What if I were in love with him?”
Ralph’s face flinched in surprise. “You’re in love with the man?”
I laughed. “If I were in love with anyone, you would be the first to know.” A lie, but one I believed harmless. “No, I am not fucking Malachy Burns, if that’s who you mean. And I’ve never thought of him as ‘little.’”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Yes you did.” I was smiling, my secret still a secret.
“I never see you except in here,” said Ralph. “You seem to spend more time with that bird than anyone else.”
“I have a life outside your charming house. Barely, but I do.”
He apologized, but as he paced, fussing with books, he seemed sullen. “Are you still happy with our arrangement?” he asked when he was hidden by a barricade of shelving.
“Of course.” I took out a rag and glass cleaner to wash the day’s fingerprints from the vitrine of birdwatching gadgets.
“I mean, you don’t feel it’s altered our friendship.”
“No.” Tools of espionage, I mused as I gazed down at all the devices of magnification we offered for sale.
Mavis and Druid brushed the backs of my legs as they pushed past me toward the garden.
“Well that’s good. Business shouldn’t become a wedge between comrades,” said Ralph, still out of sight. I laughed quietly at his frumpy reference to the two of us as
comrades
—as if we had shared a war or an expedition through uncharted jungle. I was accustomed to Ralph’s primness (a side effect of daily immersion in nineteenth-century prose), but after a morning of Tony’s cryptically blunt passions, it began to seem positively doilyesque, much like Ralph’s taste in decor.
A certain primness, too, had crept into my relations with Mal. The more intimate I became with his precarious physical state, the more distance he put between me and the rest of his life. And like a number of men I’d known who’d fallen ill, he had taken up a new, monastic diet—for which I often shopped. Twice weekly, I would emerge from the Integral Yoga market with string grocery bags (a gift from Mal’s ecofriendly mother) ballooning with kale, collards, locally pressed tofu, daikon root, and rolls of dried seaweed.
Mal embraced his new cuisine with sardonic ardor. He’d hold out a fistful of freshly rinsed broccoli sprouts and say, “Crème brûlée, anyone?” We’d share the laugh, and I’d stick around for a meal that smelled alarmingly barnlike during the cooking. I tried not to remember how the very same diet had done nothing to revitalize Frederick or Luke—though they were farther gone than Mal (I could not suppress the thought of “goneness” as if it were a process already under way).
But when I tried to get Mal to tell me more about his family or his childhood or his years as a musical prodigy, he would change the subject. He would talk more than he ever had about performances he was reviewing, foreign events he hoped his body would cooperate in letting him cover. One night he railed on and on about a
Sleeping Beauty
he had thought “beyond tacky” in its production values. At the end of his verbal scourge, we were silent.
Mal said, “Nureyev may be dying.”
I said, “Do you know him?”
“No,” he snapped, “I’m not dropping names. It’s just that I don’t take such news with equanimity.”
Mal sat on his beautiful green chaise longue, stroking the velvet like the pelt of a cat. The windows were open, and the air was infused with the humid perfume of flowering Callery pear trees. “You think about my dying, and you hate yourself for being so morbid,” he said. Knowing him as I did now, I could see that from the first mention of
Sleeping Beauty,
he’d been steering our conversation toward this, and I hated him for the manipulation. When I refused to reply, he did it for me.
“This is where you protest, because it’s only polite, and then after I tell you it’s all right to confess your worst fantasies—you’ve been too kind and generous for me to refuse you that, and it would be true—you ask me if I’ve made any plans, if I have a will, if I want my family with me—”
“Or, if I’m cruel, I tell you that everyone dies alone, no matter how many people there are in the room.”
Mal’s watch beeped. As he walked to the kitchen to take a pill, he said, “My family will have all sorts of plans about what to do with me after I’m dead, but I care more about my dying than my deadness. With that, I don’t want them to interfere.”
“Interfere?” Sucked in after all, my resistance in shambles.
“Like any good fag, I adore and idolize my mother,” Mal said when he sat down again. “But she is the most perilous kind of liberal: a devout Catholic liberal. Saints’ bones are sacred, embryos are sacred, death throes that last an eon are sacred. My father must adore her, too, because her activism—though never the least bit angry!—has kept him from national office. I’m sure of it. And me”—he laughed—“me she did a job on, too, in her own way. And I won’t let her do another.”
His speech confused me, and I blurted out, “I didn’t think you were dying quite . . .” I stopped myself.
“Quite yet.” Mal laughed again, and this time it made him cough. When he had recovered, he said, “I’m doing this on the advice of my theoretically optimistic favorite doctor, who said that everyone would be wise to make these plans. She’s promised me new drugs this fall—back-to-school special—and says I’ll be right as rain again. For however long.”
“But what plans—”
“Oh Fenno, your education has left your brain too full to be smart. I am asking you to be the—I think it’s called, ironically, ‘health’ proxy—on my living—ironies everywhere—my living will. The job is, basically, to keep me from getting stuck full of tubes.” He walked to a window. “You needn’t answer now. In fact, please don’t. I’ve chosen you not because you’re my oldest or most trusted friend, don’t get me wrong, but because you’re
around
more than anyone else I know.”
“Too dull to be invited anywhere, is that what you mean? How flattering.”
He sighed. “And I find you dependable, and I like you, and you have a cold enough eye not to go all rubbery if and when you have to pull the plug.” He laughed again, and coughed again. He leaned out the window until the coughing had passed. When he turned back to me, he said, “I wish the pear trees would bloom all summer long.”
A month later, I found out that my mother had been diagnosed with cancer. While I went to see her, Ralph would take over the shop; the boy in Mal’s building would take Felicity. Mal was scheduled to go to London about the same time, to write a profile of Jessye Norman at home. On an inexplicable whim, I asked if he wanted to fly to Scotland with me, spend a few days, head south from there.
What was I doing? Was I somehow frightened of being alone with my parents under such ominous circumstances, or had I begun to feel protective of Mal? His fragility did appear to wax and wane from one day to the next, and by now I had accepted his request and signed a document which would allow me to insist that doctors stand aside and let him die if matters became too dire. Solemnly, Mal sealed my own copy of the document in a clean envelope and handed it to me. “I suppose you should meet my mother,” he said. “Because if the worst ever happens, she’s the one you’ll have to overrule. Legalities be damned.”
Now, having sprung my impulsive invitation, I saw Mal, for the first time ever, express surprise. He gasped slightly and set his glass of water down by the sink. “I have never had the desire,” he said carefully, “to visit a country that has such a brutal past.”
“What country doesn’t?” I said lightly. I was relieved he’d be turning me down.
“‘O cold is the snow that sweeps Glencoe—’” he began to recite. A ballad I hadn’t heard since I was a child.
“Yes, yes, where the Campbells slew the McDonalds. Old news.”
“But really. Invite yourself over to make up and kiss, then kill the women and children in their sleep? Over the top, wouldn’t you say?”
I laughed. “Well enjoy yourself in pacifist Maggie Thatcher Land.”
“But I accept,” said Mal. “I’m older and more broad-minded now. Thicker-skinned. I’d love to see the blood-soaked moors. I’d love to eat sheep’s bladder stuffed with lard. Maybe that’ll cure what ails me.”
“LE VOILÀ!”
Véronique greets me in the kitchen, clapping her hands together and clasping them at her throat, as if my late appearance has made her day. “I kept the baby wolves from your door; they wished you to bring them to that little farm and make them a tour of the animals.” She hands me a cup of tea. Out the window, I see the three girls playing together under the great old lilac bush which seems to have become their headquarters. David and Lil have left for work. Dennis is nowhere in sight.
“I’d be happy to do that,” I say.
“Not now. There are other plans now.”
With my back to her, I roll my eyes, wondering when I will cease to be so predictably passive. I’d intended to take a train down to London for a few days, just to slouch sentimentally about, but the thought of announcing this departure makes me feel guilty, perhaps because I missed last night’s gathering (something Véronique doesn’t mention).
As I make myself toast, she tells me that she’s promised to deal with the checks left by guests in memory of my father—to drive them to the hospital where my mother’s cancer was treated (and, I note sourly, not cured). The hospital is in town; Dennis has told her I know the way.
“Why don’t you just post them?” I say. “Or why doesn’t Dennis drive?”
“Denis, he wants to take the girls to this famous Annie Laurie’s house. That is not an endeavor for me. And the director of the hospital, he is anxious for the funds to begin.”
“What, they’re desperate? The hospital’s broke? What kind of an object for charity is that?”
Véronique looks at me with courteous indulgence. “On the return, we will market for tonight. Denis will roast hens on the fire. It will be beautiful again for dinner out in the air—though Davide and Liliane, they have engaged themselves elsewhere. Old friends of Denis from school, he says you may know them, they will join us.”
At the thought of negotiating a Scottish town grocery with a Frenchwoman married to a professional chef, I begin to see my brother’s expertise as a prison of sorts, condemning us to spend most of our time shopping and eating, digesting and praising. I would rather play doctor with my nieces.
This is what happens when you get up too late, I admonish myself. Other people make your plans.
“We will leave in half an hour?” Véronique asks brightly, though it’s not a question. I nod, and she heads outside to check on her daughters. I reach for the day’s papers—the
Times,
the
Guardian,
the
Yeoman,
all still delivered to Paul McLeod. As I settle into my habitual slouch, my foot nudges something on the floor. I look under the table to see the doll I bought for Christine. When I pull it up, I see a dark smudge where its cloth face was stepped on. Its rice paddy hat is coming unglued. Resist identification, I tell myself sternly as I prop the poor thing in a sitting position against a bowl of red roses.
So it is that, four hours later, I find myself receiving olfactory orders from my sister-in-law. “Smell this one. No, actually place your nose within the chamber. Do not be timid.
Comme ça
!
”
Only Véronique would have the nerve to place her manicured hand behind someone’s neck (mine) and push (however gently) until I am nasally submerged in a large copper-colored iris.
“Do you smell it? For that, these are among my favorites, the bearded ones. But this scent has never been captive in a perfume. Never.”
Silently, I have to agree that the scent of this flower is wonderful, a blend of moss and honey.
I have been led by the nose (now literally) to the fortunately tithed hospital, the grocery, the apothecary, and, unexpectedly, to an explosively colorful garden. We are surrounded by towering larkspur, foxgloves, and irises, following a narrow brick path which winds toward a small grove of cherry trees. The garden, on the outskirts of the town, belongs to an old friend of Lillian’s who is off on holiday; Lil told Véronique that she must make a detour to see it. Like many gardens of the well-to-do in these parts, it stands separately from the house, across the road. We enter by an iron gate, which is probably never locked.
On our drive, Véronique kept up a stream of chatter that, by its glittering cheerfulness, nearly won me over to liking her. She spoke with loyal enthusiasm of Dennis’s plans to expand his restaurant, talked happily about her daughters’ nascent talents, and did not forget to ask me about (and appear genuinely interested in) the bookshop. She even asked me to recommend a few novels—“light, if you please!”—to help her perfect her English.
Still, I feel uncomfortable being alone with her and long to be back at Tealing. When she announced this last stop, I tried to refuse.
“Dis donc,”
she scolded, “there is always time for beauty, would you not say?” Yes, I conceded, I would have to say.