George Mills (12 page)

Why, the griefs, the griefs, of course——remotest mourning’s thrill-a-minute patriotics, its brazen, spectacular top hat, high-strutting, rim shot sympathies.

Cornell was high. For three years now it was the only way he would see people. His friends knew he smoked grass, as they thought they knew—as even his acquaintances and some of his students did—almost everything about him. He was contemptuous of whatever quality it was, not sincerity, not candor, not even truthfulness finally, that compelled his arias and put his words in his mouth. It was as if he had felt obliged to take the stand from the time he had first learned to talk, there to sing, turn state’s evidence, endlessly offer testimony, information, confession, proofs, an eyewitness to his own life who badgered his juries not only with the facts but with the hearsay too.

“Anybody see the telethon?” he asked the group around the pool. “I pledged twenty dollars. I was going to give twenty-five but at the last minute I welched because I got sore at my kids.”

They were his closest friends. One—Audrey—was having a nervous breakdown and cringed like a monkey in the shade of a big sun umbrella that bloomed from a hole in Losey’s summer furniture. Losey was the proprietor of this big house with its flourish of rose and sculpture gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, potting sheds, patio, and large paved area outside the garage like the parking lot at an Italian restaurant. There was even a dish antenna on the grounds like a giant mushroom. Losey was having an affair and had hinted he might even be in love. Nora Pat, Losey’s wife, was a second-year architecture student in the university and was probably going to flunk out. Thirty-one years old and the wife of a successful surgeon, she was on academic probation. Messenger’s wife, Paula, had her own sensible troubles. Victor Binder, Audrey’s husband, did. What the hell, they all did, some of them with griefs so bad they had had to stay home.

There was a blight on their lives even (speaking for himself, as he would, did) unto the next generation. He preferred not to think about it. He preferred to be high. He preferred television, movies, music. (He had bought quad, which had never caught on—the griefs, the griefs—and albums were piled high on each of his four speakers. They could have been mistaken for the collection of a teenager.) What he really preferred was watching the news high, welcoming public crisis, absorbed by all the terrorism and confrontations, obsessed as a president by interest rates, inflation, unemployment, living from one “Washington Week in Review” and “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation” to the next, from one “Issues and Answers” to its sequel; “NBC Nightly News” the best half-hour of his day, “Sixty Minutes” the best hour of his week. He was burned out, at forty-five reconciled to death.

Though only Judith was actually dying.

Judith Glazer had pancreatic cancer. She was the only person Messenger had ever known with six months to live, the only one who had ever had to listen to such a pronouncement. He had known others with cancer, fated as Judith Glazer, but their cases, though terminal, had been open-ended. Some lived years, some were still alive. Only Judith’s life was timed. That this should be so struck Messenger as extraordinary. “There is,” he’d said, “a cancer on her cancer,” and he did what ordinarily he would not have done when a friend was ill. He paid a call, the high seriousness and formality of the occasion so strange to him that he did not go high, visiting as callers must have done in old times, with the sense that he went gloved, hatted, walking-stick’d. As one might go to a salon, or visit a duchess. Bearing no gift save his presence, offering the sober ceremony of his conversation and hoping he was up to it, that Judith would feel them both under some superior obligation and not fuck around with him. Not acting, behaving certainly but not in the least acting, he on his part stripping himself, for all that he felt himself diplomatically dressed, prime ministerially encumbered, of all airs.

Paula went with him. Even without a strategy worked out between them beforehand, they had both chosen their garments—it was September, the woman would be dead by the end of February—with great care, as if they were going to an afternoon wedding, flown to some city three or four hundred miles distant, come not from their home but from a good motel near the airport, say, all dressed up after their morning poolside, their breakfast things still on the ground-level patio outside their room. It might have been a wedding, it might have been an anniversary luncheon. It could have been a funeral.

They had not been good friends. Judith had always been too testy for Messenger, something vestigially about her not so much mad—she’d been institutionalized for years before Cornell had ever met her—as angry, the anger a sort of prerogative clung to, even cherished, Messenger supposed, from the days when she’d been wacky, and he still didn’t understand her flash points, the vagrant, moving lesions of her multitudinous grudges. To disagree with her, even about a movie, was to risk the challenge of her wrath or, what was worse, to hurt her feelings. He had never outright told her that she was a pain in the ass, and that was how they got along. That was how even her husband, Sam, got along with her, humoring her fidget convictions.

So, though Messenger genuinely liked her, he had never been comfortable with her, had never adjusted to her own impatience with herself, her modest, willful withdrawals inside her muu-muus when she felt herself too fat, all her tense temperance. My God, he’d thought on more than one occasion, I treat her exactly the way Sam does, and, indeed, it
was
as if they were married. He’d imagined himself married to the woman, a fantasy never indulged with friends’ wives—and there were many, or used to be, till they got too old—who actually turned him on.

Now, near the start of her precious six months, she surprised them all. (He hadn’t yet seen her. She’d returned only recently from her devastating tests at the hospital.) Report had it she had become gracious, solicitous, a hostess of last resort. Having taken herself seriously all her life, she would, he supposed, treat her last months on earth with all the composure—whatever lingered of her madness was a sort of composure, a kind of sky-high deportment grander than Messenger’s in his Sunday best—of which she or any other terminal human being was capable. It was—Cornell knew he was wrong to feel this way—Sam who had most of his sympathy, and not only because his wife was dying. He had it because in Sam’s place Messenger would have felt put upon, outraged even, the duties of nursing become a sort of horrible, ultimate housekeeping he could not have held up under. Bedclothes, laundry, picking up children, taking them to lessons, preparing meals, even paying bills——these were things Messenger would not or could not do. He did not condone his sloth. Detail crippled him. Errand raised him to rage, then reduced him to tears. He was overwhelmed by such things, a man content only with contentment, truly happy only when others, too, were at leisure, made nervous even as a guest if his host was not as comfortably seated as himself. He was a summer soldier, a sunshine patriot, a good time Charlie.

So they had called and been given a time for their audience. (Visits as such were forbidden. Always formal, punctilious about their hospitality, mixing their guests with the scruples of pharmacists, Judith and Sam had in misfortune become tyrants of timing.) They parked their car and walked up to “The Cottage.” (The Glazers’ home seemed exactly what it was called on the sign above its small screened porch at the side, the only house in this neighborhood of $100,000 to $125,000 homes—their inflated values—to have a name. There was something vaguely European about it, or British——its brown woodwork, the flowered wallpaper in its living and dining rooms.) Though it was no smaller than the homes surrounding it, it seemed so. There were pebbles beside the walk leading to the front door, bushes growing in the center of the lawn, great cement urns beside the steps which dwarfed the tiny flowers they contained, making them look, for all their color, like so many cigarette butts or discarded gum wrappers. Inside, the rooms were ugly, the sofa and chairs protected from their two elderly dogs by thin blankets. The Oriental rugs were threadbare, the stuffed chairs deflated. One wouldn’t have guessed Judith an heiress, her husband the head of his department.

Messenger rang the doorbell, annoyed as always by the “Operation Ident” decal on the window of the front door. Thieves were warned that all objects of value had been “etched for ready identification purposes by the appropriate law enforcement agencies.” That meant the stereo and Sam’s expensive camera equipment, purchased at discount in duty-free shops in the Middle East when the Glazers had spent a year abroad. (They had gone around the world and their house was tricked out like the gift shops of selected international airports.)

Sam opened the door, looking, as always, confused by visitors. “Oh,” he said, “hi. Judith’s on the phone. All right, come in.” He seemed feverish to Messenger, the eyes in his youthful face—he was seven years older than Cornell but looked ten years younger—lustrous with mucus. “The phone company put in a special phone with hold buttons. Judith gets so many calls we really need it. Now if someone calls while she’s talking, she gets a signal that there’s a second call on the line. All she has to do is excuse herself, put the first person on hold and take the message from the new caller. It works just like the phone in my office.”

“Who shines your eyes, Sam?”

“What? Oh, yeah. I haven’t been getting much sleep. Judy? Honey? Here are the Messengers come to see you.”

The woman waved at them to sit. Messenger waited while Sam chased the dogs from the chairs. Judith Glazer chatted amiably on the telephone, her skin as jaundiced as her blond hair. Sam had disappeared.

Messenger had the impression she was performing for them, dragging the call out till someone else rang up so she might demonstrate the complexities of the new phone. She prattled about third parties, alluding to people Messenger had never heard of, would never meet. Her speech was for Sam too, he thought, off and busy somewhere in the house, her voice raised theatrically, its octaves just beyond her vision. She spoke with all the authority of her doom, arranging with only a minimum of consultation all the car pools of ordinary life. She spoke not as if she were not going to die before the winter was out, but as if she was never going to die.

Sam returned with the glass cylinder from a blender. It was filled with some sort of pinkish malted. He poured out the thick pink liquid for his wife and set the cylinder down on a community newspaper. Messenger noticed that the yellow hold button was lighted. “If we’re interrupting——” he said.

Judith shook her head, her strawberry mustache like a third lip. “Sit still,” she said. “Talk to Sam. Comfort Sam.”

Sam smiled. “People have been wonderful,” he said. “Judy’s lining up next week’s dinners.”

“Next week’s dinners?” Paula said.

“They bring casseroles, roasts, full-course meals. Bunny Fletcher’s coming over later to barbecue steaks for us.”

“What a way to go,” Messenger said comfortingly.

“It’s a picnic,” Sam said.

“We heard about it when we were still in Vermont,” Paula said. “Bill Richards told us.”

“What else did the provost say?”

Paula shook her hands helplessly, lowered her voice. “He told us about the prognosis. I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shrugged. “Bill’s been super. He stayed with me in Judy’s room during the exploratory. Adrian was there, too.” He looked down at his fingernails. “When the surgeon told me what they’d found, Adrian held my hand. How do you like that? He just took my hand and held it. When we got to the restaurant the chancellor was already there, waiting for us. Bill must have phoned him, or Adrian. Anyway, there he was, waiting for us. He still had jet lag. He and Bunny had just flown in from London that day.”

“Who picked up the check,” Messenger asked deliberately, “dean, provost, or chancellor?”

Sam laughed. “Life goes on,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Judith said, her phone call ended. “Why am I missing all the fun?”

“ ’Cause you’ve got cancer,” Messenger said, stripped of diplomatic status and settling for bad taste in this house of bad taste where
Consumer Reports
lay on the surfaces of the furniture like coffeetable books. Sam’s meanness was famous. Even Judith, who came from money, an heiress who would never now collect her birthright, whose great expectations had been shut down by the doctors and who, though her wealthy, highborn, Episcopal parent be struck dead that afternoon or catch the lightning in his hair, would never live through probate, joined in this joke on Sam. Who brooked no criticism of him, whose trigger-happy anger was always at his disposal, always in his defense, as much a species of big brother to him as wife, permitting no slight to her slight Jew and going along not so much dutifully as obediently with all Sam’s bargains and schemes, all his duty-free, marked-down, consumer-reported
tchotchkes
and appliances, his Sam Goody records and bulk film, his examination copies and suits by Seconds—and Sam a clotheshorse—and international flights by mysterious charter clubs and groceries from a co-op some assistant professors and grad students had founded, his order actually smuggled into their kitchen by some eligible TA. Why she even
enjoyed
his fabled economies, the fabled part anyway, encouraging them, Messenger supposed, as a harmless outlet for an anti-Semitism she had been unwilling entirely to surrender, writing them off as a cute trait of her clever Yid, much, he hoped—
oh,
how he hoped, his sense of propriety in the balance now—as she accepted the hold buttons on her telephone and the command performance dinners and her jaundiced skin the color of Valium, and her cancer.

“I never,” she said, “objected to your bad taste, Cornell. It only matters that you love me.” And she waited for his declaration.

“Of course I love you,” Messenger said, the heat on.

“All right,” Judith said, swallowing malted, refilling her glass from the cylinder, extending the glass. “Drink,” she said, “it’s delicious. There’s no medicine in it. It’s only a strawberry malt. I take it to fatten me up for when I start my chemotherapy on Thursday. Will you drink from my glass?”