He was forty-five years old, an old middle-aged man, and required marijuana whenever he left his home.
“Meals-on-Wheels,” Messenger called as he pushed open the unlocked door.
“That’s all right,” a voice called thinly.
The house looked like the inside of a stringed instrument, the wood unpainted, gray as kindling. Even the furniture was unfinished. Messenger, looking at the warped woodwork and canted floors and walls, had the sense that the rooms needed to be tuned.
“Is it still hot?”
“Should be,” Messenger said, raising his voice to the woman he had not yet seen. “I could warm it up on your stove if you like.”
“Yeah,” the woman said, “that’d be terrific. A hot free lunch would make all the difference in my life.” She came out of her room. She was pushing an aluminum walker. “I’m Mrs. Carey,” Mrs. Carey said.
“Cornell Messenger.”
“Yeah,” she said, “how do you do? I missed you yesterday. I was to the clinic for tests. I didn’t know I’d be gone so long or I’d have left a note. Cigarette?”
“No thanks.” He had already begun to reheat the chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes.
“It was the first time I was out in over a month,” she said. “It felt real good. They picked me up in one of those minibuses they send round for the handicapped. They got them equipped with special lifts for wheelchairs. Welfare gave me a wheelchair but I swear to you it’s easier to get around with my walker. I ain’t got the strength in my arms to roll it. A woman needs somebody to push her. I’ll tell you something,” Mrs. Carey said. “I think it looks common when a lady pushes her own wheelchair. That sound funny? That’s the way of it. I’m a heavy smoker but even when I was walking I never smoked in the street. That looks common, too. You think it’s foolish a woman with a Welfare wheelchair and a free walker that travels the town in the handicap bus and waits on the warmed-over charity lunch should say such things and have such notions? You put me down for pride I sit in the kitchen in my nightgown and robe while some strange guy heats my meal?”
“No, of course not.”
“Ain’t you nice,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something you’re so nice. I qualify for benefits from seventeen agencies of the United Way. Last year it was only six. Next year, if I live and nothing happens, it could be thirty.”
“You should look on the bright side,” Cornell said.
“Yeah? You think so?”
“I certainly do.”
“How about that? Say, let me ask you something. Are you important? You told me on the blower you’re making Mrs. Glazer’s deliveries, and she’s married to a big shot over at the university. Maybe you’re important too.”
“No,” Cornell said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. What’s wrong with Mrs. Glazer anyway?”
“I guess she’s sick.”
“Mind my business, huh? Okay. Let me ask you something else. What did you do with that lunch you had left over yesterday?”
“I ate it.”
“No kidding? Yeah? Maybe you ain’t important.”
“Important people eat a different lunch?”
“They eat omelets. They eat salads. They eat cold soups and thin fish. Let me ask you a question. I don’t get out much anymore. Just to the clinic, just to the agencies. Mrs. Glazer used to tell me, but she ain’t been by in weeks now.”
“Mrs. Glazer has cancer,” Messenger said.
“Oh shit,” Mrs. Carey said.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Cornell said.
“No no, that’s all right. Can I call her up? Is she home?”
“Well she’s home,” Messenger said, “but she’s very tired. It might be better if you waited.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“She’s a friend of mine.”
“Geez, I almost put my foot in it, didn’t I? How about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, forget it,” Mrs. Carey said. “I didn’t know you was that Messenger.”
“That Messenger? What do you mean? What were you going to ask me?”
An odd change seemed to have overtaken her. She became suddenly coy, teasing, returned quite mysteriously to a time when she had not been ill, the new quality somehow unseemly, as if she powered her own wheelchair perhaps, or smoked in the street. She wanted coaxing, Messenger saw, but he was annoyed. “Ha ha,” she laughed, almost singing. “Ha ha ha.” It was as if she remembered not flirtation exactly but flirtation’s poses and noises. He hoped she wasn’t going to hold her knees and sway in place. “Ha ha,” she chirped again.
“I seem to have been a regular tonic for you,” Cornell said. Was she rolling her eyes at him? Was she pursing her lips? What was this teenage pantomime all about?
“Are you holding? Have you got any mary jane on you?”
“What?”
“Are you high? Do you see visions? They jump the rates on your car insurance?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ha ha.”
“Look, lady, dinner is served.”
“Maybe you ought to give me a puff. I hear it does wonders for chicken-fried steak.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not an agency of the United Way.”
“Ooh, you’re angry.” Cornell had started to leave the kitchen. “What I’d like to know is how you find the time to come down here when there’s so much to be done at home?”
“Nice meeting you.”
“I’m a goddamn shut-in, Mister. You think it’s a disappointment to me they give a marathon in the park I can’t run in it? It ain’t the long distances that get to you, honey, it’s the yards and inches. Time and tide took the world away. You think you can buy me off with TV, radio call-in shows, fucking Action Line? My good friend got cancer and you lay down the house rules? She’s tired, it might be better if I waited? She ain’t taking calls from the lower classes just now? She’ll take mine though. Want to bet?”
“Hey, come on, what are you so excited about? Don’t get so excited.”
“How’s whoosis, Audrey? Does she still bust out crying when she reads the paper?”
“Look.”
“Can she get her own breakfast cereal yet? Or is she still too upset about the French Revolution? How’s her husband? Is he still going to commit her if she don’t shape up?”
“Judith had no right—”
“Oh, rights,” she said. “Rights ain’t in it, just needs. Like your pal, the one that’s in love. Losey. And what about his wife, the woman on whaddayoucallit, academic probation? How’s your kid?”
“What about my kid?”
“Well, we don’t know,” she said. “We ain’t sure.”
It was an exquisite situation and Messenger had to admire his dying pal and her still lively genius for humiliation. It was the wackiness, her locked-up years, all that time getting well when, denied the world and everything that was not therapy, everything not grist for her health, from Mrs. Carey’s omelets and cold soups — her digestion in those years (she’d been a long time loony, almost, she’d said, a lifer) a lesson in nutrition (he could imagine her sturdy, high-fibered boweling the consistency and color of Lincoln Logs) — to her family, the ordinary aunts and uncles (though by “ordinary” one did not mean anything bogtrot or rank-and-file: he had seen the men’s distinguished hair, their pewter sideburns, the women like seeded tennis players with their flat behinds and bellies and their hard, suntanned skin) and good-natured cousins — he’d seen them, too, and could not remember whether they were men or women: he supposed that what they had in common with each other and with Judith was not their character or sense of humor but only a frame of reference, the names of headmistresses and masters and coaches and ministers and cooks and servants, their generation itself, he guessed — and the brother almost old enough to be her father. Denied the parents themselves, those daughter-scorned victims who might, if they’d only been ministers or cooks, have gotten off, been dismissed as merely two more names in the lexicon. (And he’d seen them too, and come away impressed, even charmed, by that Chairman of the Board and his meticulously courteous wife, now dead, amazed and astonished as he always was by a wealth that seemed to have no immediate source or, what was even more astonishing, product, that did not burn gas or coal, or supply widgets, or grow food, or win or even just fight wars, or get rolled up and tossed onto your lawn each morning — that was simply, as far as Messenger could see, just pure wealth, pure money, withheld from the planet’s effects entirely, like the invisible original resources of a king or government.) Denied everything that could not induce health, hard news and strong books not permitted her, even, he’d heard, prime-time television, even make-up, even card or board games with the other patients in the common room. Allowed two things only: The first her psychiatrist (hers literally; they paid him seventy thousand dollars a year; he had no other patients), a stickler for every event of her mind who, if she had not already been mad, might have made her so with his endless inquiry — she was, it was said, his unpublished book—Judith: A Study of Causes—into her responses and reactions. And the other her lover, Sammy, the future husband and dean a simple graduate student in those days who may or may not also have been on retainer.