It was Merchant who brought the medical supplies from the clinic, Merchant who sat with him sometimes while Mrs. Glazer dozed.
“Apricot pits,” he scoffed. “How could an extract of apricot pits cure a cancer?”
“Don’t talk so loud,” Mills said.
“She knows she’s dying. The señora is a realist. But apricot pits? Where is the realism in apricot pits?”
“I know,” Mills said. “You’re going to say it should have been peach pits.”
“Chemotherapy,” Father Merchant said. “Surgery. Maybe a nice hospice. But she should never have smoked. She should have watched her diet from the beginning.”
Mrs. Glazer opened her eyes.
“You shouldn’t leave your money lying around, señora.”
“Oh,” she said listlessly, “he knows about the money. He knows about my jewelry. Now I shall be murdered in my bed.”
But no one wanted her life, and their life together — for now he lived with the woman more intimately than ever he had with his wife — had become relentless.
He knew the shape of her appetite, the shade of her stools. It was extraordinary. He knew her past — as she knew his; he told her about the first George Mills, he described Cassadaga for her and the Mills who had intrigued with courts and empires, filling her in on how the family had bogged down in history, how it remained untouched by the waves of rising expectations that had signaled the rest of Western civilization out of its listlessness, giving her the gray details of a survival that was neither hardy nor valorous — but with her own governing, emergent lassitude, she had broken off her once ordered narrative. There were odd lacunae. She was nuts in one frame and securing a large dance band for her elder daughter’s confirmation party in the next. He learned about the struggle for Sam’s deanship, Milly’s progress in piano. But what had happened to Judith, any coherent feel for all that had predated their introduction to each other on the strange occasion of his going to collect her condolence call, all, that is, that was beyond his immediate observation, or not pertinent to either her needs or her demands, remained privileged information. He was interested of course. She was all he had to fill up his time. And, as she herself had insisted, she had no secrets. If she had stopped talking, if she had stopped listening, it was because all she had to fill up her time was herself. She was simply too busy now feeling her way along the murky routes and badly graded switchbacks of her decline and separation from the world to have much time for him.
Meanwhile, though he did everything, there was not much he could do for her. Occasionally, in the cool mornings, Mills still carried her outdoors and bundled her in one of the lounges where she could watch the children playing in the water, holding their breaths, racing, playing Marco Polo. But soon she lost interest in even this passive diversion and asked to be taken back to her room.
He fetched and carried from moment to moment and caught real glimpses of her only during the brief respite between the chores he performed in the name of her body. Which had gone into crisis, some emergency alert lived, or at least felt, at the pitch, the up-front prerogatives of her thirst or her weariness or even of the foul taste exploding in her mouth like the bomb of a terrorist.
Handling her nausea was a two-person affair, one to describe it, the other to chip the light dusting of salt from her soda crackers and feed them to her in pieces. She had lost impassivity only where her body was not concerned and guided him now through his massages, telling him where the flaccid muscles in her foot still pinched, warning him of a cramp developing in her neck, detailing discomfort as well as suffering, totally involved in getting off every last one of her body’s messages, in translating from further and further away the foreign language that was all around them, all the sense of her senses. He was an expert, reeling off for them, the nurses and doctors at the clinic, Judith’s infinite symptoms and impressions with an impressive and devastatingly authentic Siamese collaterality. (“This woman I live with…” he’d said to the pharmacist, scraping away the last conjugal implications of the phrase. He meant lived with.)
“I have,” she said, “a thickish wet in my groin.”
“I’ll get Kotex,” he said, for he somehow understood that she was describing not some new trial but the onset of her period, which, oddly, had not yet stopped.
Then, suddenly, she stopped even that crimped sharing. She lay in waiting, somewhere between the terror of calling it off and going back home and the terror of continuing in Mexico.
On the one hand she knew the Laetrile had failed, on the other that in Mexico she was out of the hands of the doctors, that in St. Louis they would start the chemotherapy again, baking and stewing her with their lasers, their cobalt, turning all the peaceful uses of atomic energy against her.
“I’ve been a fool, Mills. I could have died a martyr to cancer by letting them treat me. Tell about today’s episode.”
She was no longer well enough to watch “Maria, Maria,” and kept up by having Mills read her the synoptic squib in the El Paso paper.
Father Merchant came in one Friday evening but Mills gave him the key to his room and waved him off. He waited there until George called him. It was past nine.
“She’s had her bath,” George said softly. “She’s almost comfortable. The señora can hear you. Go ahead, please.”
“Madam,” said the old man, “this week Maria’s father is released from the jail and finds the patrone to who he have saled his daughter. Of course he does not recognize her because it has been nine years and she has flowered. The girl was hardly barely inside her puberty when he has sell her. He have a beard now and white hairs.”
“Mills has read me all that,” Mrs. Glazer said. “The courtship scene, please, Father. The dialogue and fine points.”
“Buen dia, señorita. ‘No, no, please don’t get up, por favor. Well well, I have not see such a lovely creature as yourself since, since…My my, it is the truth, there are none such pretty ladies in the country from which I have came.’
‘What is that country, señor?’
‘Its name is loneliness.’
‘Señor!’
‘The thousand pardons, señorita. The hand of my arm is a rough beast. The filthy scoundrel is forgot its manners.’
Por favor, señor!’
‘If you would but permit it to touch the face of your head.’
‘But—’
‘It is just that it cannot believe such a haunch is real.’
‘Oh. Ooh!’
‘Ai ai! It is the miracle.’
Por—ai ooh ooh ai! — favor, señor! This thing that you do is glorious but shameful. I must ask that you stop.’
‘But señorita—’
“I must ask that you stop,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Get my morphine, please, Mills.”
“She has pain? She wants her medication?” Merchant said. He examined the vial into which Mills had just plunged a hypodermic syringe. “Twelve milligrams of morphine? Twelve? Not fifteen? What have you done, señor? What have you allowed them to sell you?”