Did women really wear this stuff? Maybe he would have loved it, Elizabeth thought, fingering the chiffon-and-satin tap pants. I could have given him six years of leopard-skin bustiers and push-up bras and black silk stockings held up with black satin rosettes. I could have pleased him, I wasn’t busy. And if I had, I could just let him die now, I wouldn’t even have to send flowers.
The salesgirls were not unused to gloomy young women picking up silky items in despair, putting them aside, and picking them up again, eyeing red satin panties and hand-embroidered nightgowns with reluctant, embarrassed hope. Even the stupidest salesgirl knew that underwear, even underwear dotted with seed pearls and edged with slender pink ribbons through the inch-wide lace trim, didn’t really make a difference. Still, they watched Elizabeth, and the youngest, newest salesgirl was determined to sell her something. She showed Elizabeth things young women wear to please young men, virginal gowns in transparent white cotton, strips of pink satin cut for small breasts and long, hard thighs.
“No,” she said. “It’s not what I’m looking for. My boyfriend’s not this type.” Elizabeth smiled, thinking of what type Max had been, and the salesgirl decided she’d been mistaken, that this was not another girl in love with the wrong guy.
“Okay, what type is he?”
“Conservative. Like a father.” Like a father, if you wanted a life on talk shows.
“Your boyfriend is like my dad?” The salesgirl took a step back, clutching at the edge of a bleached pine cabinet filled with soft pastel undershirts, apparently taken off the backs of rich little girls.
“Sorry, I don’t even know your father,” Elizabeth said, very sorry that she was wasting Max’s last hours on this blonde moron. “I just know — I just know this guy. Something outrageous, okay? Let’s find something completely outrageous. Something to bring the dead back to life.” The salesgirl was not happy, but she worked on commission. She helped Elizabeth find everything she wanted.
Elizabeth buttoned up her old raincoat in the hospital parking lot and went through reception. She passed two Candy Stripe girls, dark as cherrywood, with organza bows clustered high and bright atop their small sleek heads, like tribal headdresses from Woolworth’s. The nurse at the station stepped in front of her, but Elizabeth said she was Max’s niece and kept going. Pat O’Donnell was the daughter of Elizabeth’s eighth-grade English teacher; she had her father’s pre-ulcerous stomach and twenty years of nursing, and she knew that wasn’t a niece, not with those heartsick eyes, but she didn’t care. Might be interesting when the wife showed up.
Max lay in bed, his head propped up by two slippery hospital pillows, his hair a greasy spray of grey spikes. They had taken the tubes out of his nose but left two still winding down into his chest and another one connecting his left arm to a bulging, transparent drip bag. He looked like the Tin Woodsman, poorly patched and strapped together, wandering the cold world over for a heart. Elizabeth’s own heart beat between her ears, blood pooling in her veins.
“You’re here,” Max whispered.
Tears floated on the inside-out red edges of his eyes, and the visit Elizabeth had imagined dissolved. She would not do a quick and funny strip for him, dropping one shoulder of her trenchcoat to reveal her black lace bra. The sight of her white skin and tight black garters would not raise him off the bed. Scented talc gleaming between her breasts and thighs would not steady his breathing. He was going to die because she had been selfish and stupid and childish. He was going to die because she hadn’t answered his letters. I have to go right now, she thought.
Max’s hands lay folded on his chest. “Je ne regrette, je ne regrette, non, je ne regrette rien,” he sang out hoarsely in cartoon French.
“Peter, this is Elizabeth. I need some sick leave or vacation, whatever. Time off.”
“All right. Why?”
“My father’s very sick. I think he’s dying.”
“Jesus. Your father? I’m sorry. Are you going to stay with him until … I mean, for a few weeks?”
“I don’t know. I have to take care of him. I have to nurse him.”
“Of course. You know, my mother died of cancer five years ago. Do what you have to do. I can hold the job for at least three months.”
“Fine. Okay. I’ll call you soon. Thanks.” I should have gone out with you. I should be buying animal-shaped mugs and a butcher-block kitchen table, and I should be going in some other direction. I am not old enough for rubber sheets and bedsores and that smell which is as recognizable as reveille.
The backseat was layered with jeans and cotton underpants and all of Spivey’s healthy-heart cookbooks and a shopping bag spilling new shampoo, new soap, two kinds of mouthwash and a sponge still in its natural loofah shape. Elizabeth had shopped like she was sending herself to camp. Camp Max, the special endless summer for wayward girls. She would be with him, in some small airless place, until he died or recovered or she killed him. She had a full tank of gas, she had her coffee, her candy, and enough cash. The radio was on and the windows were cracked open.
“Play ‘Woolly Bully,’ ” said the tired Jersey voice. A housewife/mother voice, a three glasses of canned juice, three bowls of leftover Cheerios floating in thin, sweet milk by 7:25 a.m. voice. Screaming at the kids to remember their books, remember their notes, remember not to let the cat out. Kisses to remind them that she screams only because she loves them, wants them to succeed, wants them to be somebody. And then there is nobody home until three. A no-power, no-money voice.
“Okay,” said the flat smirky deejay. “And do you have a woolly bully, ma’am?” Like he’s behind her in the supermarket, laughing at her fat ass and curlers and the bent-in backs of her loafers.
“Oh yeah, honey. I did used to have one … but I divorced him.”
She’d fooled them both, and the deejay laughed with Elizabeth, in the pleasure of acknowledging grace and steel where they hadn’t seen it. Maybe he, like Elizabeth, imagined the caller as a mother, imagined the watery orange juice coming with the kind of mothering you never stop trying to get, or get away from.
“Lady, you can call me anytime.”
“Likewise,” the woman said. “So, put on my man, Sam the Sham,” she said.
Elizabeth sang along. She began a list with her right hand.
In his hospital room, newspapers beginning to pile up by the bed, roses wilting on rubbery stems, Max made his offer.
“If you come stay with me for a little, you might get to watch me die. Or kill me at your leisure. Could you stick around?”
Elizabeth wheeled him to the car, sliding him into the backseat. Two orderlies stood by as if to help, but Elizabeth managed to bang Max’s head against the car door and they didn’t move.
“I want you to live, Max.” She buckled his seat belt.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “I always try to give you what you want.”
“No. You gave me what you wanted me to have. I’m not arguing with you. I want you to live.”
“I don’t think so, baby.”
Elizabeth put her face an inch from Max’s ear and spoke very softly and clearly.
“You better fucking live. If you don’t make up your mind to live, I’m going to camp in your goddamned room and make sure you get intravenous nourishment and no painkiller. Okay? You better fucking live.”
Oh, Do Not Let the World Depart
“Elizabeth, if you could get Max out of the place for a few hours, I could fix it up a bit.”