“What kinds of things?”
“Oh, it’s a mess, you’ll know.” He had pulled off his tie and was winding it around his hand, then letting it unravel. “For starters, she has me looking around for a better, bigger job. But really I don’t want a bigger job. She thinks I’ve settled, gotten too comfortable at the hospital. I say what the hell is wrong with too comfortable? I’ve got a pretty much worry-free system for myself. Next thing she brings up is how I should sell my condo and buy a real house. And what a ‘real house’ really means scares me. Liv herself is one big stressor, with a host of others ready in her pockets. She’s MIRVing, Doc, targeting me all over.”
“She has much warm feeling to offer, I think.”
“I know, I know. You’re absolutely right. You know what she said last night at my place? You won’t believe this. She’s talking about the big one. ‘Renny,’ she says, ‘I’m going to be forty-two in a few weeks. I’m past my time.’ I didn’t answer her, because you’ll know, Doc, I was sort of scared to awful death, and then she gets up from bed and goes to the bathroom and starts to cry. She comes back with a washed face and she turns out the light and just clings to me, real tight. I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
“She would like to get married?”
“Oh, God, no. I can’t believe that. But maybe everything just short of it. This morning she’s got that farness in her eyes, staring at me over her coffee mug, the I’m-closing-this-one-if-it-kills-me look. Doc, I feel my life passing before me.”
“If I may say something, Renny, it seems that perhaps you might want some of the same things as Liv….”
Renny didn’t answer right away, helping me instead with the screwpull, as the cork was old and crumbling. When he finally got it open he poured it out and I could see from his expression that the wine was no good anymore, if it ever had been. It was brownish and a bit cloudy. But I had nothing else in the house and Renny poured a full glass anyway, and I found him some pretzels to mask the taste.
“I’ve never been against having children or getting married, never. But in my imagination I assumed it would be with a woman not at all like Liv Crawford. Not at all. Maybe I’m more traditional than I know, but I thought it would be someone more like your late friend, Mary Burns. I didn’t really know her, of course, but this is what I thought. A woman with a quiet grace and stature. But not in the least unproud. Someone who couldn’t help but be a good mother. Now Liv is quite a woman, a real bolt of light, but I’m not so sure she’s motherhood material. Not just from my point of view, but hers as well. She’s right about running out of time, but I’m afraid she’s just doing this because it’s a final opportunity, like coming across a good house whose owner is in danger of foreclosure, just automatically plowing ahead because there’s no other reasonable option. I may be too hard. But should I be the one to plow ahead with her, Doc? I think yes, certainly, I will, I will, and then, definitely, absolutely, not. You’ll know how this is making me quite upset.”
I could see that, but Renny Banerjee is a fellow who never appears too perturbed. He drank most of the bad bottle of wine and ate the entire bag of pretzel twists, and I would have improvised something more substantial for him to eat, but he had dinner plans with Liv.
On the way out he noticed the full bin of mail and picked it up for me and asked where I would like it. Usually I opened mail at the desk off the kitchen, and so he walked back in and put it down, and suddenly he had his jacket off and sleeves rolled up and he pulled up another chair. “Let’s get this done,” he said, taking a fat handful. He did the work quickly, first sorting out the fliers and bulk mail and solicitation letters, then separating the bills and credit card statements and other semi-important notices from the other first-class letters and cards, of which there were quite a number. He held one up and I nodded and so he opened it, calling out the name, and then he went through the rest like that, cards from the florists, and from the deli woman, and from practically every other merchant on Church and Main streets who had been there at least a few years, long enough to know who I was. There was a card from the Hickeys, or Mrs. Hickey, with a little “Patrick” scratch. There was one from Liv, and then a few sent by her competitors at Century 21 and Better Homes and Prudential, who also called me periodically and were likely keeping abreast of my general state of health. There was a card from Mr. Stark at Murasan’s Smoke and Pipe, enclosed with a small packet of my favorite tobacco, which I gave to Renny, who has taken up pipe smoking to go along with his cigars and cigarettes. And finally there was a get-well card from no one, subdued in style with only slightly curled script lettering, without even a signature or “Dear…” handwritten around the poetry/sentiment, just a blurred red postmark on the envelope and no return address.
After throwing away the junk mail and stacking the bills in order of payment, Renny carried the bundle of cards to the family room, where he and I set each one up on the mantel, so that it looked almost like Christmastime, when I still receive many cards from around town, though the number grows steadily smaller each year. He seemed quite satisfied with our work. “I wouldn’t bother trying to respond to all these,” he said. “There are too many. Besides, no one expects it. Just say thanks to everyone you see again in town. That’ll do, you’ll know. Just step out and go around and say how you feel.”
* * *
I WANT TO DO that very thing now, of course, slow at each door and awning and window case and flip down the passenger-side window of my old and lumbering gray Mercedes coupe and perhaps not so softly call out my general gratitude for the collegial thoughts and kindnesses, but it’s the selling hour, after all, and what would I be doing but disturbing the bustling morning of the town’s activity by showing myself in an odd one-man parade that evokes no one’s great nostalgia or longing. Even with a mantel full of cards, I know that more often than not in the past few years of my retirement, I’ve found the collective memory here to be shorter than I wished to believe, and getting shorter still. I’ve gone from being good Doc Hata to the nice old fellow to whoever that ancient Oriental is, a sentence (I heard it whispered last summer while paying for my lunch at the new Church Street Diner) which carries no hard malice or prejudice but leaves me in wonder all the same. For while I’m certain this sort of sad diminishment befalls every aging gentleman and — woman, and even those who once held modest position in the town’s day, I am beginning to suspect, too, that in my case it’s not only the blur of time and modern life’s general expectation of senescence, but rather the enduring and immutable fact of what I am, if not who; the simple constancy of my face. I must wonder then, too, whether a man like me should be happy enough with the accrued comforts of his life, accepting the minor losses, or else seek out those persons who no matter how sharp their opinion or emotion at least know him in all his particulars.
And so as I come upon our poor-cousin town of Ebbington, with its shut-in facades and littered sidewalks and grubby rash of convenience stores, I’m struck low with the thought of where I am actually going. Winding around the main traffic circle and then down the commercial strip to the Ebbington Center Mall, the place where my erstwhile daughter now makes her living, I think back to yesterday morning, when I called the store, a Lerner’s, and asked for the manager. After a long pause a voice came on to say, “Yes?” with hardly anything but the most solicitous tone, rising and heedful, the pitch of the word so terribly willing, and thus for me unanswerable, that I gently put down the handset.