Everyman (7 page)

Nancy had been with him for this procedure too, and afterward, when he got back to his room and he lowered one side of his hospital gown to show her the visible bulge that was the embedded defibrillator, she had to turn away. "Darling," he said to her, "it's to protect me—there's nothing to be upset about." "I know that it's to protect you. I'm glad there is such a thing that's able to protect you. It's just a shock to see because," and finding herself too far along to come up with a comforting lie, she said, "because you've always been so youthful." "Well, I'm more youthful with it than I would be without it. I'll be able to do everything I like to do, only without having to worry about the arrhythmia putting me at serious risk." But she was pale with helplessness and couldn't stop the tears from running down her face: she wanted her father to be the way he was when she was ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen, without impediment or incapacity—and so did he. She couldn't possibly have wanted it as much as he did, but for that moment he found his own sorrow easier to accept than hers. The desire was strong to say something tender to alleviate her fears, as though, all over again, she were the more vulnerable of the two.

He never really stopped worrying about her, nor did he understand how it happened that such a child should be his. He hadn't necessarily done the right things to make it happen, even if Phoebe had. But there are such people, spectacularly good people—miracles, really—and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter. He was amazed when he looked around himself and saw how bitterly disappointed parents could be—as he was with his own two sons, who continued to act as if what had happened to them had never happened before or since to anyone else—and then to have a child who was number one in every way. Sometimes it seemed that everything was a mistake except Nancy. So he worried about her, and he still never passed a women's clothing shop without thinking of her and going in to find something she'd like, and he thought, I'm very lucky, and he thought, Some good has to come out somewhere, and it has in her.

He was remembering now her brief period as a track star. When Nancy was thirteen she'd placed second in a race at her all-girls school, a run of about two miles, and she saw the possibility of something in which she could be exceptional. She was good in everything else, but this was another kind of stardom. For a while he gave up swimming at the club first thing so they could run together in the early morning and sometimes, too, in the day's waning hours. They'd go to the park and it would be just the two of them and the shadows and the light. She was running for the school team by then, and during a meet she was rounding a bend when her leg gave way and she fell to the track in agony. What had happened was something that can happen to a girl in early puberty—because the bones don't fully harden by that age, what would have been in a mature woman merely a strained tendon was more dramatic for Nancy: the tendon held but a piece of bone in the hip pulled away. Along with the track coach, he rushed Nancy to the hospital emergency room, where she was in great pain and very fearful, especially when she heard there was nothing to be done, though at the same time she was told, correctly enough, that the injury would heal by itself over a period of time. But that was the end of her track career, not just because recovery would take the rest of the season but because puberty was upon her, and soon her breasts enlarged and her hips widened and the speed that was hers when she had her childish body disappeared. And then, as if the end of her championship running and the alteration of her physique weren't enough to leave her reeling, that very year delivered the misery of her parents' divorce.

When she sat on his hospital bed and wept in his arms it was for many reasons, not least for his having left her when she was thirteen. She'd come to the shore to assist him and all his cool-headed and sensible daughter could do was relive the difficulties that had resulted from the divorce and confess to the undying fantasy of a parental reconciliation that she had spent more than half of her life hoping for. "But there's no remaking reality," he said softly, rubbing her back and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way."

That was the truth and the best he could do—and exactly what he'd told her many years earlier, when he held her in his arms in the taxi coming home from the emergency room while she shook with sobs because of the inexplicable turn of events.

All these procedures and hospitalizations had made him a decidedly lonelier, less confident man than he'd been during the first year of retirement. Even his cherished peace and quiet seemed to have been turned into a self-generated form of solitary confinement, and he was hounded by the sense that he was headed for the end. But instead of moving back to attackable Manhattan, he decided to oppose the sense of estrangement brought on by his bodily failings and to enter more vigorously into the world around him. He did this by organizing two weekly painting classes for the village residents, an afternoon class for beginners and an evening class for those already somewhat familiar with paints.

There were about ten students in each class, and they loved meeting in his bright studio room. By and large, learning to paint was a pretext for their being there, and most of them were taking the class for the same reason he was giving it: to find satisfying contact with other people. All but two were older than he, and though they assembled each week in a mood of comradely good cheer, the conversation invariably turned to matters of sickness and health, their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies and the swapping of medical data crowding out nearly everything else. At his studio, they more readily identified one another by their ailments than by their painting. "How is your sugar?" "How is your pressure?" "What did the doctor say?" "Did you hear about my neighbor? It spread to the liver." One of the men came to class with his portable oxygen unit. Another had Parkinson's tremors but was eager to learn to paint anyway. All of them without exception complained—sometimes jokingly, sometimes not—about increasing memory loss, and they spoke of how rapidly the months and the seasons and the years went by, how life no longer moved at the same speed. A couple of the women were being treated for cancer. One had to leave halfway through the course to return to the hospital for treatment. Another woman had a bad back and occasionally had to lie on the floor at the edge of the room for ten or fifteen minutes before she could get up and resume working in front of her easel. After the first few times, he told her she should go into his bedroom instead and lie down for as long as she liked on his bed—it had a firm mattress and she would be more comfortable. Once when she did not come out of the bedroom for half an hour, he knocked and, when he heard her crying inside, opened the door and went in.

She was a lean, tall, gray-haired woman, within a year or two of his age, whose appearance and gentleness reminded him of Phoebe. Her name was Millicent Kramer, and she was the best of his students by far and, coincidentally, the least messy. She alone, in what he charitably called "Advanced Painting," managed to finish each class without having dripped paint all over her running shoes. He never heard her say, as others did, "I can't get the paint to do what I want it to do," or "I can picture it in my mind but I can't seem to get it on the canvas," nor did he ever have to tell her, "Don't be intimidated, don't hold back." He tried to be generous to them all, even the hopeless ones, usually those very ones who came in and said right off, "I had a great day—I feel inspired today." When finally he'd heard enough of that, he repeated to them something he vaguely remembered Chuck Close's having said in an interview: amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work. He didn't start them with drawing, because barely a one of them was able to draw, and a figure would have set up all sorts of problems of proportion and scale, so instead, after they'd finished a couple of sessions going over the rudiments (how to lay their paints out and arrange their palettes, and so on) and familiarizing themselves with the medium itself, he set up a still life on a table—a vase, some flowers, a piece of fruit, a teacup—and encouraged them to use it as a reference point. He told them to be creative in order to try to get them to loosen up and use their whole arm and paint, if possible, without fear. He told them they didn't have to worry about what the arrangement actually looked like: "Interpret it," he told them, "this is a creative act." Unfortunately, saying that sometimes led to his having to tell someone, "You know, maybe you shouldn't make the vase six times larger than the teacup." "But you told me I should interpret it" was invariably the reply, to which, as kindly as he could, he in turn replied, "I didn't want that much interpretation." The art-class misery he least wished to deal with was their painting from imagination; yet because they were very enthusiastic about "creativity" and the idea of letting yourself go, those remained the common themes from one session to the next. Sometimes the worst occurred and a student said, "I don't want to do flowers or fruit, I want to do abstraction like you do." Since he knew there was no way to discuss what a beginner is doing when he does what he calls an abstraction, he told the student, "Fine—why don't you just do whatever you like," and when he walked around the studio, dutifully giving tips, he would find, as expected, that after looking at an attempt at an abstract painting, he had nothing to say except "Keep working." He tried to link painting to play rather than to art by quoting Picasso to them, something along the lines of their having to regain the child in order to paint like a grownup. Mainly what he did was to replicate what he'd heard as a kid when he started taking classes and his teachers were telling him the same things.

He was only called upon to be at all specific when he stood beside Millicent and saw what she could do and how fast she got better. He could sense right off that she had a knack that was innate and that far exceeded what little gift some of the others began to demonstrate as the weeks went by. It was never a question with her of combining the red and the blue right off the palette but rather of modifying the mixture with a little black or with just a bit of the blue so that the colors were interestingly harmonious, and her paintings had coherence instead of falling apart everywhere, which was what he confronted much of the time when he went from easel to easel and, for lack of anything else he could think of, heard himself saying, "That's coming along well." Millicent did need to be reminded "Don't overwork it," but otherwise nothing he suggested was wasted on her and she would look for the slightest shade of meaning in whatever he told her. Her way of painting seemed to arise directly from her instincts, and if her painting didn't look like anyone else's in the class, it wasn't solely because of stylistic distinction but because of the way she felt and perceived things. Others varied in their neediness; though the class was largely full of good will, some still resented it when they needed help at all, and even inadvertent criticism could make one of the men, a former CEO of a manufacturing company, frighteningly touchy. But never Millicent: she would have been the teacher's most rewarding pupil in anyone's amateur painting class.

Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it's the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it's what's inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.

"Don't you have some medication you can take?" he asked her.

"I took it," she said. "I can't take any more. It doesn't help but for a few hours anyway. Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse. I'm sorry I'm in such a state. I apologize for this."

Near her head on the bed was a back brace she'd removed in order to lie down. It consisted of a white plastic shell that fit across the lower spine and attached to a web of elasticized cloth and Velcro straps that fastened snugly over the stomach an oblong piece of felt-lined canvas. Though she remained in her white painting smock, she had removed the brace and tried to push it out of sight under a pillow when he opened the door and walked in, which was why it was up by her head and impossible not to be continually mindful of while they talked. It was only a standard back brace, worn under the outer clothing, whose plastic posterior section was no more than eight or nine inches high, and yet it spoke to him of the perpetual nearness in their affluent retirement village of illness and death.

"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked her.

He could see by looking into her eyes how difficult the pain was to bear. "Yes," she said weakly, "yes, please."

Her husband, Gerald Kramer, had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a county weekly, the leading local paper, that did not shy away from exposing corruption in municipal government up and down the shore. He remembered Kramer, who'd grown up a slum kid in nearby Neptune, as a compact, bald, opinionated man who walked with considerable swagger, played aggressive, ungainly tennis, owned a little Cessna, and ran a discussion group once a week on current events—the most popular evening event on the Starfish Beach calendar along with the screenings of old movies sponsored by the film society—until he was felled by brain cancer and was to be seen being pushed around the village streets in a wheelchair by his wife. Even in retirement he'd continued to have the air of an omnipotent being dedicated all his life to an important mission, but in those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheel-chair—a man no longer able to smash a tennis ball, to sail a boat, to fly a plane, let alone to edit a page of the
Monmouth County Bugle
—could answer to his name. One of his dashing eccentricities was, for no special reason, to dress up from time to time in his tuxedo to partake of the veal scaloppine at the village restaurant with his wife of fifty-odd years. "Where the hell else am I going to wear it?" was the gruffly engaging explanation that went out to one and all—he could sometimes woo people with an unexpected charm. After the surgery, however, his wife had to sit beside him and wait for him to crookedly open his mouth and then feed him gingerly, the swaggering husband, the roughneck gallant, with a spoon. Many people knew Kramer and admired him and out on the street wanted to say hello and ask after his health, but often his wife had to shake her head to warn them away when he was in the depths of his despondency—the vitriolic despondency of one once assertively in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute.