She has seen Milton on the news now. She has seen him in the papers. Battered now, bloated, everything about him coarse and puffed, Milton still has shards of Nathan's old beauty and all of his presence, more than all his charm. Years ago, during family gatherings, when she was more daughter than anything else, Claire sat on Milton's expensive chairs, looked out Milton's expensive views, watched his wife tracking the great man around the room the way she herself tracked Nathan at parties and clubs: she knew where Nathan was, whom he was talking to, the level and quality of his effort. Always measuring the angle at which he leaned toward the women peering up at him, the intent of his smile. And he, running the two middle fingers of his right hand along the rim of his lower lip. And she, not wanting to know, not wanting to be caught watching; unable to stop. As Nathan's mother had not been able to stop.
Then, before she'd made her first discoveries, before spotting then denying evidence of the first woman, the third, the others – the faceless crowds of women-she understood the lie had exhausted itself. And for such ridiculous reasons-for the sight of his wrist, a white shirt cuff folded back, the tan leather of his watch strap against his tawny hairs; the way his back looked as he crossed the floor of her room, naked, and adjusted the blinds; the feel of his hands spreading on her pelvis; his eyes, thighs, smell, taste, his heat-he was always warm, always burning, always she held on to him like she was holding fire. By the streetlight leaking through the blinds she stared at him as he slept. In her office, across the desk from a client, he floated in front of her eyes until, humiliatingly, she blushed. It was all humiliating. That in a crowd he and not she would draw everyone's eyes; that she was just one of the great flock of women wanting him.
Then, toward the end, as her blindness broke down, there was her attraction to Nathan's mother. Pain, fury, longing, desire, Nathan's mother-not more foolish, just stronger-had endured it, as she was enduring it. After it was all over she sent that old woman flowers on her birthday. She still did. In one of the cards a few years ago she told her about Nathan's baby, and that it had died. Even her own mother did not know. Nathan's mother wrote back. It was a small card, and on it small words. It said, beautifully, accurately, that it was horrible and good that it was dead.
Nathan expects, for some reason, St. Luke's to be full to overflowing, the emergency room to be filled with accident and gunshot victims, but the lobby is empty, the wards quiet, and the regulated air everywhere is still but for the low hum of distant floor buffers. He walks the linoleum floors, between walls shimmering in the bluish light. Through open doors here and there the perfume of oxygen and iodine, machines announcing flutters in pulse and heartbeat. He stops before the elevator he's ridden a dozen-two dozen-times and stands staring at the dark line between the doors. A bubble of light floats up and the doors open and hold apart while an orderly inside waits. Get in. Go up. The orderly looks at Nathan, then releases the doors and they close again and the line goes dark. Nathan turns and walks on down the stairs to the basement cafeteria. He expects to hear the woman with the washerwoman's face behind the register say, It's about time, she needs you, where have you been? But she says nothing at all.
Scattered about the long plastic tables are insomniac patients in paper slippers and the relatives of patients already long established in endless stretches of wait and wonder. Paper cups, half-eaten bowls of canned fruit, sandwiches wrapped in plastic. A doctor in her white coat, hunched over her coffee, her eyes closed. A pair of men sit against the back wall, whispering together, one old enough to be the other's father. The younger one kneads his hands together and nods as the other offers counsel.
Nathan chooses a middle-aged man with a coat slung over his shoulders, tapping a plastic spoon.
"You have someone upstairs?" he asks, lowering himself diagonally across from him.
The man looks up. "You?"
Nathan nods. "I've been up there already today. Now I'm just, I don't know, hanging around, I guess."
"I know what you mean."
"To be nearby."
"I understand."
"I tried, but I can't go up."
The man slides a box of Wheat Thins across the table. The little square crackers inside seem somehow wafers of repentance, and Nathan accepts. He is happy just to hold them in his palm. He hasn't eaten them in years; Claire used to keep them around the house.
The man is chewing slowly, and they don't have much to say to each other, and that's going to be fine. Nathan strains his ears now to hear anything in the hushed hospital basement. The click of plastic chairs against the linoleum. Sometimes he thinks he hears a new baby crying, shoving its way out of its mother's bloom; a doctor laughs; a taxi honks in the street outside the high mesh window. These sounds are enough to remind him of life. He would not expect Maria in her death to make a human noise.
Nathan, clearing his throat, relents. "Who's upstairs?"
"My wife."
"She going to be all right?"
"They say so."
"She having a baby?"
The man shakes his head. "No. We're done with all that. We have three at home. My sister's over, taking care."
"Three children. That's wonderful. I'm sure everything will be fine.
"She's going to pull out of it."
Nathan nods. "That's the way to think."
"I'm going to sit here all night," the man says.
Nathan slips off his jacket. "I'll stay with you a while."
The man looks at him. "Maybe you should go up? You look like maybe you want to. It'll make you feel better to, you know, just pop in, say hello." When Nathan doesn't reply the man shrugs. "Whatever makes you comfortable," he says, then stands and heads for the coffee urn at the front of the cafeteria and Nathan watches him as he goes. The man's shoulders are low slung, his gait slow, his hands thick, his knuckles like gnarled knots of wood. He works, this man, he's in a union and he scratches and scrapes and leaves tooth-fairy coins under his kids' pillows. Nathan sees in him signs of old Joe, his grandfather, Milton's father, sweet Joe the plumber. Maybe that is why he chose this man to sit by. Joe's pillowed hands veined with grime – he'd left school at fourteen, he and his encyclopedic mind. His stacks of opera recordings and shelves of Dickens and Proust, gibberish to a household of immigrant brothers, all but him willing to throw away their days calling down through the windows to their friends, taking positions on the street as though awaiting the enemy. He kept vocabulary lists on old napkins, envelopes, telephone books, and finally diaries, scrawling over the day and date, leaving them scattered around the apartment, fingering them with his beefy fingers like an actor rehearsing all day the script of what follow. Trying out for a different part. Meanwhile, he was to sweated pipes and ran iron snakes through waste lines beneath Brooklyn and groped through the shit of countless babies and ingrates and dreamers, squirreling away the stray dollars to send Milton, his only child, to law school. Nathan knows little but enough to understand that from this man he could have learned everything. But he chose the wrong generation to copy, one son too late.
The man returns with two coffees and sits directly across from Nathan. "They save your life and send you on home and then kill You there with the damn bill."
Nathan blows across the top of his cup. "Insurance?"
The man shakes his head. "Nothing at all. I have a pension, but they'll take that and more. What about you? Who do you have?"