"I suppose I ought to get him a new cleaning woman," he said finally.
"I think you ought to start checking out nursing homes," I told him.
"On my salary?"
"Doesn't he have money of his own?"
"Oh yes," he said. "I suppose there's some of that."
16
When we got back to his house, Ransom asked me if I wanted something from the kitchen. We went through a dining room dominated by a baronial table and into a modern kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a double bed and deep counters lined with two food processors, a pasta machine, a blender, and a bread maker. Ransom opened a cabinet and brought down two glasses from a crowded shelf. He shoved them one after the other into the ice-making contraption on the front of the refrigerator and filled them with silvery crescents of ice. "Some kind of water? Soft drink?"
"Anything," I said.
He swung open the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water with a picture of an iceberg on the label, broke the seal, and filled my glass. He handed me the glass, returned the bottle, and pulled bags of sliced meat and wrapped cheeses and a loaf of bread from the shelves. Mayonnaise, mustard in a stone crock, margarine, a head of romaine lettuce. He lined all of this up on the butcher block counter between us, and then set two plates and knives and forks beside them. Then he closed the refrigerator and opened the freezer door on shelves of frozen cuts of meat, a stack of frozen dinners, a big frozen pizza wedged in like a truck tire, and two shelves filled with bottles of vodka resting on their sides—Absolut Peppar and Citron; Finlandia; Japanese vodka; Polish vodka; Stolichnaya Cristal; pale green vodkas and pale brown vodkas and vodkas with things floating inside the bottles, long strands of grass, cherries, chunks of lemon, grapes. I leaned forward to get a better look.
He yanked out the Cristal, unscrewed the cap, and poured his glass half full. "Really ought to chill the glass," he mumbled, "but it's not every day that your wife dies, and then you have to shove a seventy-six-year-old man into the shower and make sure he cleans off the shit smeared all over his legs." He gulped down vodka and made a face. "I practically had to climb in with him." Another gulp, another grimace, another gulp. "I did have to dry him off. That white hair all over his body—ugh. Sandpaper."
"Maybe you should hire that nurse, Eliza Morgan, to spend at least the daytime with him."
"You don't think my father-in-law seemed capable of caring for himself? I wonder what might have given you that impression." John dropped more ice crescents into his glass and poured in another three inches of icy vodka. "Anyhow, here's the sandwich stuff. Dig in."
I began piling roast beef and swiss cheese on bread. "Have you thought about how you'll tell him the truth about April?"
"The truth about April?" He set down his glass and almost smiled at me. "No. I have not thought about that yet. Come to think of it, I'll have to tell a lot of people about what happened." His eyes narrowed, and he drank again. "Or maybe I won't. They'll read all about it in the paper." Ransom set his glass back on the counter and rather absentmindedly began making a sandwich, laying a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread, then adding two slices of salami and a slice of ham. He peeled a strip from a slice of cheese and shoved it into his mouth. He stuck a spoon into the crock of mustard and stirred it aimlessly.
I put lettuce and mayonnaise on my own sandwich and watched him stir the mustard.
"What about funeral arrangements, a service, things like that?"
"Oh, yes," he said. "The hospital set up an undertaker."
"Do you own gravesites, anything like that?"
"Who thinks about stuff like that, when your wife is thirty-rive?" He drank again. "I guess I'll have her cremated. That's probably what she would have wanted."
"Would you like me to stay on here a few more days? I wouldn't mind, if you wouldn't feel that I was intruding or becoming a burden."
"Please do. I'm going to need someone to talk to. All this hasn't really hit me yet."
"I'd be glad to," I said. For a little while I watched him push the spoon around inside the grainy mustard. Finally he lifted it out and splatted mustard on his strange sandwich. He closed it up with a piece of bread.
"Was there any truth in what you told her father about her company's merger with the other brokerage house?" I asked him. "It sounded so specific."
"Made-up stories ought to be specific." He picked the sandwich up and looked at it as if someone else had handed it to him.
"You made it all up?" It occurred to me that he must have invented the story shortly after April had been taken to the hospital.
"Well, I think something was, as they say, in the wind. Something was wafted here and there and everywhere, like dandelion seeds." He put his sandwich down on the plate and lifted his glass and drank. "You know the worst thing about people who do what April did, people in that kind of work? I don't mean April, of course, because she wasn't like that, but the rest of them? They were all absolutely full of hot air. They gab in their morning meetings, then they gab on the phone, then they gab to the institutional customers during lunch, then they gab some more on the phone—that's it, that's the job. It's all talking. They love rumors, God, do they love rumors. And the second-worst thing about these people is that they all believe every word every one of them says! So unless you are absolutely up-to-the-minute on all of this stupid, worthless gossip and innuendo they trade back and forth all day long, unless you already know what everybody is whispering into those telephones they're on day and night, you're out, boy, you are about to get flushed. People say that academics are unworldly, you know, people, especially these bullshit artists who do the kind of thing April did, they scorn us because we're not supposed to be in the real world? Well, at least we have real subjects, there's some intellectual and ethical content to our lives, it isn't just this big gassy bubble of spreading half-truths and peddling rumors and making money."
He was breathing hard, and his face was a high, mottled pink. He drained the rest of his drink and immediately made another. I knew about Cristal. In just under ten minutes, John had disposed of about fifteen dollars worth of vodka.
"So Barnett and Company wasn't really going to open a San Francisco office?"
"Actually, I have no real idea."
I had another thought. "Did she want to keep this house because it was so near her father's place?"
"That was one reason." John leaned on the counter and lowered his head. He looked as if he wanted to lie down on the counter. "Also, April didn't want to be stuck out in Riverwood with dodos like Dick Mueller and half the other guys in her office. She wanted to be closer to art galleries, restaurants, the, I don't know, the cultural life. You can see that, all you have to do is look at our house. We weren't like those dopes in her office."
"Sounds like she would have enjoyed San Francisco," I said.
"We'll never know, will we?" He gave me a gloomy look and bit into his sandwich. He looked down at it as he chewed, and his forehead wrinkled. He swallowed. "What the hell is in this thing, anyhow?" He ate a little bit more. "Anyhow, she would never have left Alan, you're right." He took another bite. After he swallowed, he tilted his plate over the garbage can and slid most of the sandwich into it. "I'm going to take this drink and go up to bed. That's about all I can face right now." He took another long swallow and topped up his glass. "Look, Tim, please do stay here for a little while. You'd be helping me."
"Good," I said. "There is something I'd sort of like to look into, if I could stay around a couple of days."
"What, some kind of research?"
"Something like that," I said.