A tube snaked down the hole in Obie’s throat. Les was the only one she “talked” to — grunts, clicks and tortured exhalations amid farts and yowling tears. He sat with her every day after work and on weekends. One blink for yes and two for no assured she was compos mentis. He wished, mercifully, that she weren’t.
It wasn’t an overdose at all. Oberon Mall went in for a root canal and bacteria got in the blood, attacking a congenitally weakened valve in her heart. It festered there before unleashing a shower of emboli to effervesce the brainstem, blocking supply of blood to the pons — the area commanding movement. When the tide rolled out, death of tissue left her marooned—“locked-in,” went the jargon — a Big Star cognitively undamaged, sensoria intact, dungeoned in a useless body, a catheterized sandcastle princess on a wide dead sea.
He left her to the caretakers when it became too much, Obie with her ungodly wail, blind but sensing his departure, the distraught dermatologist rushing for the elevator while nurses unstuck watery carbuncle of bedpan, rotating her so she wouldn’t grow decubiti. A few days in, two attendants were caught photographing her nude, their hands on her.
Les wondered how much she could see. Once in a while, when he held her, an eye rolled up and looked into his like something from Sea World. Her doctors, most of them friends from medical school, said Obie would never recover movement or speech. Les couldn’t imagine that. Perhaps he’d assume care once she was discharged. When she got over her depression (if that were possible), she would require a van, with driver and attendant, like the Getty boy. He would have to get with her accountants. She was completely vulnerable now. The court would need to appoint an executor. The only relative he knew of was the mother, and Edith wasn’t able. It would be easy for him to step in. They shared the same attorneys, and he knew Obie would agree to such an arrangement. But could he afford it, emotionally? Professionally? There was still the matter of the Medical Board investigation. If Obie fell to his care, he would hire a publicist for a few months, a friend at PMK. He’d been thinking of doing that anyway. He was already being slandered — there were whispers of the root canal story being a cover, that Les had furnished the drugs that destroyed her. People would say he was just doing penance with his attentions, Big Star — martyred, reading aloud to her for hours, Tolstoy and George Eliot, arranging on-line chats with Chris Reeve, visits from Deepak Chopra, injecting collagen here and there for old times’ sake. Hosting morbid dinner parties…Who cared what they said? He loved her and would do the right thing. Yet he knew what happened to “love”—he’d been through that with his mother during her slow decline. How many times he had wished her dead, wanting to piss into that hairy, sleeping scowl of a mouth.
He would accommodate. Les’s spirits rose as he saw himself arriving at a benefit with Oberon and her pharaonic attendants — a famous pair the Doctor and Big Star would make, odd and legendary, real New Yorker material, Avedon’d and Yohji’d in summer whites, Obie tied by Hermès scarves to a high-tech wheelchair, atrophic and glorious in her Anna Sui, gums overgrown from anti-seizure meds.
Once Obie’s mom was coaxed into coming, she didn’t want to leave. The ICU nurses bent the rules and let her sleep in a cot in the room. Les took her to Mortons while the medics fiddled with the Big Star gastrostomy tube.
Edith had gained about a hundred pounds since he’d seen her last. She was remembered as a tall, lanky woman, a big-boned American classic — pasty and menstrual-smelling now, cheeks like slabs of halvah, wet with tears. A borderline schizophrenic, she lived alone in a building Obie had bought and christened the Edith-Esther. Her mother was holy to her. Big Star had managed to keep her existence from the world and that was good, because Edith Esther Gershon was not built for scrutiny; she was gentle and alien and rarely left her rooms. Les remembered stopping over one night after a premiere. Edith giddily showed them the bawdy printouts of her dialogue with AOL lotharios. One of them, a Turk, owned a strip club in Akron. He wanted to know how “tall” Edith’s breasts were and Obie laughed until she cried.
Calliope told Les he didn’t look well. She said he needed time off and gave him “permission” to recharge in Rancho Mirage.
Les left Thursday and drove back Sunday night, top down all the way. He hadn’t done that since college. The freeways were clear, the night a velour, spangled dome. He thought about Obie, turning the pages of the memory album while “Streets of Philadelphia” repeated itself on CD. They had some hilarious times. As the air knifed around him, the physician felt grateful and alive. I’m not paralyzed, he thought, then said it aloud. And said it again, louder this time, as if courting danger, shouting his Schadenfreude to the stars. The words soured in his mouth and he felt naked and foolish, unclean, ashamed. He recoiled as he heard the voice: You should really try to stop being such a fag….
Les drove to the hospital.
The cot was empty and a curtain was drawn around Obie’s bed. A small light shone within.
He hesitated to enter, thinking her in the midst of some intimate minor procedure. He tried to discern silhouettes, then went in. The two laid atop the sheets, Oberon in her mother’s puissant arms, mouth fastened to nipple. Edith’s tear-streaked face looked up and smiled, lips trembling like an ecstatic clown. Les’s mouth was open too and he covered it with one hand while the other felt for a chair. Eyes riveted, he backed up, noiselessly lowering himself as if onto a pew.
“Hey, there.”
Eric was at the Sweets bar when Donny walked in.
“There he is,” said the agent.
“Here for dinner?”
“No — I was at Muse.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Absolutely. Absolut.”
It was a Monday crowd — the place had become so hot that Monday was the only hip night left.
“Have you been to see her?”
“Yeah,” Donny lied. He hadn’t visited once.
“Pretty horrible, huh.”
“Pretty horrible.”
“Do you believe — is it true about the root canal stuff?”
“Yeah, it’s true.”
“Jesus. Phylliss was really freaked out.”
“A lot of people were.”
“She went over to see her.”
“To the hospital? You’re kidding.”
“It really freaked her out.”
“What did she say? That she was rewriting the part for a quadriplegic?”
“Yeah, right!”
They laughed darkly and sipped their drinks.
“I heard your mother died,” Eric said. “I guess this hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for a lot of people.”
Donny impulsively asked if he wanted to go somewhere else. The assistant was flattered and surprised. He ducked into the men’s room while the agent waited for the valet. A few boisterous associates came and went, and Donny was grateful to have been standing there alone. Eric said he was parked on the street. They left his car and wound up at a club in Silverlake.