“He’s dying,” Benny tells him. “But I’ll tell him all about you anyway.”
—
On the way back, he runs into a rainstorm. The car shakes from side to side from the force of the crosswinds. Overhead, the clouds have a horror-movie look. On the freeway, cars coming in the opposite direction have their headlights on, and their windshield wipers are oscillating at high speed. Inside the cars, the drivers have the stricken I-was-there faces of trauma survivors. Soon enraged supercharged raindrops mixed with BB-size hail pelt the front windshield like liquid bullets, the impact sounding metallic as the projectiles hit the glass more forcibly with each mile, until the windows fog up, and Benny pulls over to a rest stop, where he waits out the storm.
—
“Guess who I saw at the Gray Wolf Casino?” Benny asks upon entering Dennis’s hospital room. “Nathaniel Farber. The old actor. They hired him as an official greeter up there.” He sits down next to the hospital bed, facing away from his friend, who does not like to be looked at in his present condition.
“No kidding. Moon over Havana. Billy Wilder used him once. He played a health inspector. Our grandparents’ generation — he always reminded me of Gene Raymond. Just a minute, just a minute,” Dennis says, staring at the TV set hanging from the ceiling. “Storage Wars is on. I gotta see what’s in the locker.” The gap in conversation allows Benny to examine his friend’s face, which has grown gaunt. His eyes have that staring look. He wears a maroon-and-gold stocking cap.
“I won a few hundred dollars up there,” Benny says. “I couldn’t lose. By the way, where’s your mom?”
“Downstairs in the cafeteria. She likes the hubbub. It’s a contrast to here.”
“How long will she be in Minneapolis?”
When Dennis doesn’t reply, Benny turns to him and sees that his friend has fallen asleep, probably from the morphine. Or perhaps he’s had a pain spasm. Benny reaches over and shuts off the TV set.
“Hold my hand,” Dennis says, his eyes still closed. Benny takes Dennis’s hand in his own, and they sit there for a moment in silence.
“Can you believe that she left me? For a law student?” Benny asks.
“Can you fucking believe this? I’m dying,” Dennis says, with his eyes still closed. “I talked to my oncologist yesterday. He had just looked at the new X-rays. He said, and I quote, ‘Dennis, if I told you your cancer hadn’t spread, it’d be like saying that shit doesn’t stink.’ ” He sighs. “He needs to practice his bedside manner. What happened to tact? Tell me again about what she said to you last night.”
Benny tells him the story again: Nan’s new guy, Thor, the runner, dedicated to practicing poverty law once he passes the Minnesota bar, has replaced Benny in her affections. Dennis’s hand feels cold and dry in his own. Once again he seems to fall asleep. “I can’t even think about architecture,” Benny tells Dennis. “All I can think about is her. She’s got me in her grip.” Dennis nods. “Buddy, is there anything I can do for you?”
“Get the nurse,” Dennis says. “I need more morphine. Like right now. Pronto.”
Benny releases Dennis’s hand and walks down to the nurses’ station and tells the woman — Lucille, her name is — who’s in charge of his friend that his friend is in pain again and needs more morphine immediately. Lucille says she’ll be down in ten minutes, and Benny returns to room 530.
“You’ve been losing weight,” Dennis says dreamily, before coughing uncontroll
ably. “So have I.”
“I’ve been running. I gotta try to look good.”
“You’re going to end up like Nathaniel Farber, that line of thinking.”
“Why?”
“Any man over the age of thirty-five who isn’t overweight is a narcissist.”
“That’s kind of oversimplified.”
“No, it isn’t,” Dennis says. “You met Nathaniel Farber, didn’t you?”
“Don’t leave me here,” Benny tells Dennis, after a long silence. “Don’t go away.”
“Don’t leave me here,” Dennis repeats, holding his hand out for Benny to take. “Don’t go away.” After another long silence, during which they both hear a car horn honking outside, Dennis asks, “What was her name again?”
“Nan.”
“Oh, right. I introduced you to her.”
“Yeah,” Benny says. “I guess you did. At that party.” If you invited Dennis to a party, he would always hold out on you, in case there might be a better party elsewhere.
“We had a thing,” Dennis says. “Nan and me. For two weeks. I told you that. She was cute. Don’t be offended, but I slept with her. I slept with all of them. Maybe that’s why I got cancer. Or maybe it was the cocaine. There’s a theory about cocaine and…” He winces. “It’s all disinformation.”
“But that was just lust, what you had,” Benny says, wanting to rouse Dennis to argumentation after another pause, with the hospital’s ventilation system whirring in the background. “What we had, Nan and I, well, that was special.”
That morning when Nan had made scrambled eggs in Benny’s apartment kitchen, she had added salsa, and when she approached the kitchenette table where Benny was sitting, wearing only his boxer shorts underneath which his dick was again hardening to pay her tribute, she carried the serving plate toward him with a expression of the purest happiness and anticipation, and at that moment, though never afterward, she walked toward him looking like a gift, like all the colors of the rainbow. If that wasn’t love, what else could it be?
“You’re funny,” Dennis says to Benny, as Lucille comes in, closing the curtain around Dennis momentarily. When she draws the curtain again, his face has relaxed somewhat.
“Well, there are other fish in the sea,” Benny tells his friend. “That’s the cliché with which I comfort myself. Other fish, other seas. I’ll be feeling one hundred percent soon.”
“You’re funny.”
“But I need coaching. From you.”
“You’re funny.” Then he says, “You’re going to be on your own in no time flat. Where’s your hand?” Benny takes his friend’s hand again.
“How come this?” Benny asks.
“I’m scared.”
“Well, you have a right to be,” Benny says, before he realizes how undiplomatic that is. “I only meant that…”
“I know what you meant.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry. Did I tell you…they found a hospice for me?”
“No. You didn’t tell me.”
“It’s out in Hopkins. It’s cheap. At last: a hospice I can afford. Where are the girls now?” Dennis asks. “Where have the girls all gone? I haven’t had a lot of them visit me. Maybe they’ll drop roses on my casket.”
“They’ll be here.”
“Describe them. Do me a favor. Tell me a story. Let’s fill the time.”
“Well,” Benny says. He tries to think of what would comfort his friend. A paradise, not of virgins but of experienced worldly women, funny, quick-witted, sharp-tongued women, moviegoers who know the difference between early and late Ozu, or Kurosawa, of the styles of screwball comedies, of Stanwyck saying, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” but instead, sitting next to the bed and holding the hand of his friend, who seems now to be drifting into unconsciousness, he launches into a verbal dreamworld of tits and ass, blowjobs, ecstasy, a little touch of verbal porno here at the bedside, to keep his friend’s spirits up, at least for a while.
Sloth
For an hour the doctor could think of nothing worth doing and no reason to rise from his chair, so he sat in a corner of the coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, four blocks away from the hospital, with the newspaper’s sports section spread out in front of him, unread, the evening traffic outside going by with the characteristic hiss of tires on wet pavement, a sibilant personal sound like whispering. He gripped a double espresso but did not drink it. Wind gusts whipped the decorative downtown trees. That day on rounds he had checked in on one of his patients, a little girl whom he had diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome. She had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart that had not been caught before some damage to the valves had occurred. This infection had been followed by a stroke. The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying there, was unrecogniz