The Husband (23 page)

The second tavern he picked was one where he could sit at a table out of sight. He didn’t want people staring at him. Not now. He tried to enunciate his order carefully.

He was not a drunk. He simply needed another drink.

He imagined the lecture he would deliver if Jonathan, some years hence, caught with a marijuana cigarette, would say he wasn’t an addict, you don’t become addicted to marijuana, it was a clarifying experience, the pressures were on him, school, girl friend, problems. Marijuana cleared the air; he needed it. Would Peter understand?

Generations do not understand each other’s vices. These new kids, the dropouts, the hippies, even the non-hippies who did the college bit—didn’t they make sex and love and live with each other with a casualness that would defeat too-quick marriage, cut down divorce? Or was that an illusion? Or would they get divorced more often but more easily?

It wouldn’t be the same.

Because his glass was empty, he ordered another drink.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
True or false? The ends remain the same—power, accomplishment, freedom to say no or yes. It was the means that changed from generation to generation. And not the kinds of lies—lying was mankind’s great tool for making do when the truth was useless—but the form the lies took. The lie about divorce was once necessary to conceal the fact that fallible men fouled their own most intimate arrangements, and if insight came, what a human being wants is a second chance.

Okay, divorce is no crime, not anymore, but the children business? What grim architect of marital warfare decided that children were the ultimate weapon?

Children were God’s objective. Man’s, too, when he found out immortality was a fake storefront: how go on if not through children? Part of me will live after me, feet walking the earth rather than pie in the sky. At least, they’ll think of me when I’m gone,
or will they
? Do they? Some. Sometimes. Not much assurance there, he thought

“I want one more double,” he said, making the waitress a witness to his resolve.

Children weren’t just for putting flowers on the grave, for wearing one’s face around life, for keeping the name on mailboxes somewhere. The trick of children—a colossal trick worthy of God—was that they were really not children but
independent people
, independent of their parents often before they were independent of the customs, clichés of living—the umbrella called society. And as independents, some of them were lousy. I mean, let’s face it, he thought, one could have kids that were just half good, or no good, or bores, or untalented, or mean or stupid. It’s not likely they’d be very stupid or very mean if the parents were smart and the upbringing somewhat decent, but the world was littered with successive generations that seemingly had greater differences than similarities. Wasn’t genetics itself a kind of freak-out, skipping a generation for important traits, or was that part of the master plan? Didn’t the Indians have the grandparents teach the children most of the time? Was that a clue?

But some of those independent people—
new name for children
—were quicker, smarter, better, more talented, wiser, yes, by age twenty or thirty or forty, wiser than the parents whose passion play conceived them in the first place. Look at the kids, and their parents! If what mothers and fathers wanted of their children had propelled so many generations, what a fantastic centuries’-long self-delusion, what utter crap.

Baby animals found their independence so fast—they had to, their lives were so short. But humans took so long, needed someone to cajole food into one end of the alimentary canal and in due course wipe up the remains at the other end, and cuddle, love, care for—though wasn’t an old blanket more lovable? Once out of babyhood, children weren’t children; they were
new people
. If marriage fails and you get divorced, it increases the chance for independence of the new people. How’s that for a home truth?

The newsreel of Peter’s mind was flickering in black and white images of hostile experts, all wearing eyeglasses, badges of intellectual success, pooh-poohing his asinine insights.

The psychiatrists won’t buy it. The social workers won’t buy it. Not now, anyhow. Some day, to do someone else some good. This history of thought and science is the history of abuse and disgrace, of closed minds flapping their wings in the face of anything not in the literature,

“You can’t fight City Hall,” he said to no one in particular, as he left a dollar for the waitress, paid at the bar and hailed a taxi in the now near night.

Elizabeth was home.

He gave her the short version of what had happened. She wanted details. He wanted a drink. Cautiously she poured him one.

“Little on the short side,” he said, noticing the inch of liquid over the ice cubes. He took the bottle from the table and, with his unsteady hand, poured in more than he had intended. “I’ll drink slowly,” he said.

Elizabeth tried to get his mind off the afternoon by snaring him in chitchat, but the conversation was all one way. She wasn’t even sure he was listening.

She tried the phonograph. She knew enough to avoid his favorites—Stravinsky, Schönberg, Bartók, cacophony. She tried Haydn. He wasn’t listening. He said the noise bothered him.

She noticed he was pouring another drink.

She prepared some pasta in a way he particularly liked, but Peter swirled his fork in the plate without eating until she gave up and suggested they go to bed.

She helped undress him. She kissed his passive mouth. To no avail. It was the first time he had ever failed to respond to her.

When she returned from the other room and got into bed beside him, she thought for a moment that he was asleep. Then the lids of his eyes opened. She tried to touch them closed with her fingers and realized that he was crying without tears. Her head on his chest, she could hear the thumping inside.

She couldn’t help, so she lay back on her pillow and must have dozed off after a time, because when she awoke with a start, Peter was slumped asleep in the chair at the opposite side of the room.

Careful not to make any noise that might awaken him, she got out of bed, slipped her feet into her slippers, and it was only when she had crossed halfway to him that she noticed the peculiar insensibility of his sleeping expression, and a jolt of alarm thrust itself into her consciousness. He looked so strange.

With speed she went to the bathroom but there were none of the signs she was looking for, but then back at his side her eyes focused on the glass beside him. He had obviously poured himself another half tumbler of whiskey and drunk almost all of it, and then she saw the plastic medicine bottle with one red pill. It seemed stuck in the bottom of the bottle. There was another one on the floor near his foot.
Where were the rest?

The fool, not with alcohol, not with alcohol. She tried to pull him up, to get him to walk. He was too heavy for her. She tried to wake him. It was impossible. She put up hot water for coffee, hoping to force some black coffee into him, trying to remember what else there was to do, but when she returned to the living room his breathing seemed to have changed to a barely audible internal lisp, and all the muscles in his face had relaxed frighteningly.

She tried pulling some clothes onto him, despaired, wondered who could help her drag him down to the elevator and outside to a cab, and then she did the only thing left—called an ambulance, invoking the God of her childhood, hoping against hope that Peter would live.

Chapter Fifteen

He felt the slight signal from the tips of his fingers first a dart of barely perceptible sensation shooting through the pervasive numbness of his body.

He unstuck his eyes and saw the nurse busily fidgeting with a gadget at the left side of his bed. Why didn’t she look at him?

“Nurse?” he said, glad to hear the drowned rumble of his voice.

“Don’t move,” she ordered, then looked up at last. “I’m not the nurse. I’ll call her as soon as I’m through.”

Peter now noticed the strap around his left wrist, with a wire leading to the nurse’s machine. Right wrist also. There were straps around both ankles, he observed now, each with a wire leading to the same machine.

The nurse who wasn’t a nurse opened Peter’s pajama top and sloped it over his shoulders without moving him. Then she took a suction cup, attached by wire to the contraption, and placed it on his chest. Then somewhere else on his chest. Then around on his left side. And all that time the machine buzzed away.

“EKG,” she said. “Electrocardiogram.” She was removing the straps from his limbs, unhooking him from the machine.

Of course. He had had one during an insurance exam.

“How’s it look?” he asked.

“The doctor’ll have to read it.”

“Can you give me a clue?”

“It looks all right to me.”

“You’d say that even if it wasn’t.”

“Right,” she said. He wondered if she was a Lesbian.

As the technician wheeled the machine out of the room, the white-capped nurse came in, a metal name badge over her breast pocket, her teeth flashing a smile. Peter squinted at the name badge.

“It’s Ceracki,” she said, pronouncing it differently than it was spelled. “How are you feeling, Mr. Carmody?”

“I felt my fingers,” said Peter.

“That’s a good sign.”

“Especially after they’ve been amputated,” he said.

She quickly said, “Nothing’s been amputated,” then realized he was joking and laughed.

“I’m very thirsty.”

“Sure.” She got a glass from a cabinet across the room, along with a glass straw, ran some water, and held the glass for him while he sipped at the angled tube. The water was as good as the first drink after a rough day’s work.

The thought of whiskey nearly made him gag. She thought it was her fault and readjusted the glass straw in his mouth. The effort of drinking was tiring, and he stopped.

“Could you just leave that near the bed?” he said, flicking a hand at the night table.

She shook her head. “Just buzz when you want more.”

He realized instantly, of course, that the usual bedside items weren’t handy because of “precautions.”

“What’s the matter?” she said.

He hadn’t realized his expression gave so much away. “I haven’t been a criminal before. It takes getting used to.” It was beginning to come back. The feeling in the fingers had not been the first sign of consciousness. But the other things had seemed like part of a nightmare, the few instants of wakefulness while his stomach was being pumped, the terrible retching in the emergency room. Why did he remember the screaming of the ambulance siren as after that? “What hospital am I in?” he asked.

“Parkside Memorial,” she said. “You were transferred from Roosevelt when it looked like you’d make it and they found out you weren’t indigent. This is a private hospital.”

“Thank heaven for Blue Cross,” he said.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Anyway, your bill’s been guaranteed.”

“Oh?” he questioned.

She showed him the calling card on the large bouquet of flowers which he had assumed to be a hospital prop. The card said, “We’re with you.” It was signed, “Paul.”

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He felt like he was going to do both at the same time.

“Try to take it easy,” said the nurse. “The doctor’ll be making his rounds soon.”

He thought of a young intern taking his pulse, trying to look older, official, authoritative, and failing. He was wrong. When the doctor showed up, he turned out to be the resident psychiatrist, who wasn’t young or official-looking, and his authoritativeness all lay in a Central European accent.

The doctor delivered a little lecture about the hazards of mixing Seconal and alcohol, a little to-do about how lucky he was to have gotten medical help in time, and a few questions.

“I didn’t mean to take my life,” said Peter. “I just wanted to stop living for a while.”

The “for a while” cracked the doctor up. “You nearly spoiled your plans. The mix you took wasn’t a temporary formula, Mr. Carmody.”

“What about that electrocardiogram?”

“Nothing to do with you. Nothing wrong with your heart. We’re doing a study at the hospital, you know, the relation between suicide and other factors. We’re checking on previous heart damage. You’d be surprised at the number of businessmen who’ve had heart attacks who try to commit suicide over something else later. God misses. They miss. Life goes on. Feeling better?”

“Better than what?”

“Okay, you’re feeling better. See you later,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of slashed wrists next door to talk to.” Peter reflected as to how inappropriate physical and mental medicine was to most ills of the human condition. How far more advanced were car mechanics, who could make a nonfunctioning car run and a poorly functioning car run better. White cap interrupted his reverie.

“The doctor says you can see them.”

“Them who?”

“Three of them have been camping out there for some time.”

Foolishly he tried to comb his hair with his hands and tidy the bed a bit, but he didn’t have the strength for it, really, and slumped back onto the pillow as the door opened once more and Elizabeth stood there as if she expected to see a corpse.

In slow motion her expression loosened into a great smile, and she rushed across to the bed, holding his face, kissing his cheeks with an emotion he hadn’t known, a fierce, possessive, almost furious clutching at the fact of his life.