“….”
“Well, and the doctor’s quite upset, understandably, at the man’s not having called him in so long, what was he to think? And the doctor’s also of course more than a little concerned about the spread of the disease, and he looks the man over and clucks his tongue and says that this is just about the latest the expensive Switzerland-treatment can start and still be effective, and that if they delay any longer the disease will swallow the man completely and become irreversible and he’ll be alive but gray and flaky and gnarled all over for all time. The doctor looks at the man and says he’s going to go out of the office and let him think it over. The doctor clearly thinks the guy’s out of his mind for not being in Switzerland already. And so the man sits in the office, alone, all bundled up, with his mittens on, and has a real crisis, and his heart is breaking, and he’s incredibly horrified, because of the obsession-obsession, but finally he has a breakthrough, which is not too subtly symbolized by a ray of sunlight breaking through the heavy clouds that are in the sky that day and coming through the window of the doctor’s office and hitting the man, but and anyway he sees in this breakthrough that the most important thing is really his wonderful, lovely girlfriend and their love, and that that’s what really matters, and so he decides to call her and tell her everything and get her to come down and co-sign the withdrawal slip for his life savings so he can hop a flight to Switzerland that very day, and to hell with the horror of telling her, even though it will be unbelievably horrifying.”
“Wow.”
“And the way the story ends is with the man sitting at the doctor’s desk, with the phone in his mitten, listening to the phone ring in the apartment, and it’s ringing quite a few times, though not yet a ridiculous number of times, but enough so it’s just becoming by implication unclear whether the girlfriend is even still there or not, whether she’s taken off, maybe for good. And that’s how it ends, with the man there and the phone ringing in his mitten and the patch of sun on him through the doctor’s window.”
“Good Lord. Are you going to use it?”
“No. Too long. It’s a long story, over forty pages. Also poorly typed.”
“….”
“Stop that.”
“….”
“Lenore, stop it. Not even remotely funny.”
“….”
“….”
“Except how did you know so much about it?”
“Know about what?”
“Second-order vanity. You were like really surprised I didn’t know about second-order vanity.”
“What shall I say? Shall I simply say I’m a man of the world?”
“….”
“….”
“Ginger ale?”
“Not right now, thank you though.”
3. 1990
/a/
A nurse’s aide threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble, which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, one of which, preparatory to flight, released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while the birds flew away, making sounds.
Flowerbeds of pretend marble, the plastic sagging and pouty-lipped in places from the heat of the last month, flanked the smooth concrete ramp that ran up from the edge of the parking lot to the Home’s front doors, the late-summer flowers dry and grizzled in the deep beds of dry dirt and soft plastic, a few brown vines running weakly up the supports of the handrails that went along the ramp above the flowerbeds, the paint of the handrails bright yellow and looking soft and sticky even this early in the day. Dew glittered low in the crunchy August grass; light from the sun moved in the lawn as Lenore went up the ramp. Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun. Above the doors, along a narrow tympanum of sun-punched plastic again pretending to be igneous marble, ran the letters SHAKER HEIGHTS NURSING HOME. On either side of the doors, impressed into stone walls that reached curving away out of sight to become the building’s face, were entombed the likenesses of Tafts. Inside the doors, in the glass tank between outer and inner entries, languished three people in wheelchairs, blanket-lapped even in the greenhouse heat of the mid-moming glass, one with a neck drooping so badly to the side that her ear rested on her shoulder.
“Hi,” Lenore Beadsman said as she hurried through an inner glass door frosted in the sunlight with old fingerprints. Lenore knew the prints were from the wheelchair patients, for whom the metal bar with the PUSH sign on it was too high and too hard. Lenore had been here before.
The Shaker Heights Home had just one story to it. This level was broken into many sections and covered a lot of territory. Lenore came out of the hot tank and down the somewhat cooler hall toward this particular section’s receiving desk, with the tropical overhead fan rotating slowly over it. Inside the doughnut reception desk was a nurse Lenore hadn’t seen before, a dark-blue sweater caped over her shoulders and held with a metal clasp on which was embossed a profile of Lawrence Welk. People in wheelchairs were everywhere, lining all the walls. The noise was loud and incomprehensible, rising and falling, notched by nodes of laughter at nothing and cries of rage over who knew what.
The nurse looked up as Lenore got close.
“Hi, I’m Lenore Beadsman,” Lenore said, a little out of breath.
The nurse stared at her for a second. “Well that’s not terribly amusing, is it,” she said.
“Pardon me?” Lenore asked. The nurse gave her the fish-eye. “Oh,” Lenore said, “I think the thing is we’ve never met. Madge is usually here, where you are. I’m Lenore Beadsman, but I guess I’m here to see Lenore Beadsman, too. She’s my great-grandmother, and I—”
“Well, you just,” the nurse looked at something on the big desk, “you just let me ring Mr. Bloemker, hold on.”
“Is Gramma all right?” Lenore asked. “See I was just in—”
“Well I’ll just let you speak to Mr. Bloemker, hello Mr. Bloemker? A Lenore Beadsman here to see you in B? He’ll be right out to see you. Please hang on.”
“I guess I’d rather just go ahead and see Lenore. Is she OK?”
The nurse looked at her. “Your hair is wet.”
“I know.”
“And uncombed.”
“Yes, thank you, I know. See I was just in the shower when my landlady called up the stairs that I had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”
“How did your landlady know?”
“Pardon?”
“That you had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”
“Well it’s a neighbor’s phone, that I use, but she didn‘t—”
“You don’t have a phone?”
“What is this? No I don’t have a phone. Listen, I’m very sorry to keep asking, but is my Gramma all right or not? I mean Mr. Bloemker said to come right over. Should I call my family? Where’s Lenore?”
The nurse was staring at a point over Lenore’s left shoulder; her face had resolved into some kind of hard material. “I’m afraid I’m in no position to say anything about…,” looking down, “… Lenore Beadsman, area F. But now, if you’ll just be so kind as to wait a moment, we can—”