Let Me Be Frank With You (21 page)

Finesse's size and swaying stride create a peppermint airstream, where I'm following behind. “I thought that funny l'il preacher—whatever
he
was—wasn't ever gonna leave,” she's saying as if she and I know each other. “
Fice
. Idn't that a dog's name? I don't b'lieve I met
you
. I
did
meet some of them.” She's leading me through a dark screening theater and on into a paneled man-study with
Vanity Fair
prints, crossed wooden tennis rackets, the (apparently) complete Harvard Classics and a big Cape buffalo's head staring somberly down off the wall. We pass then into a
club
room—snooker table, highboy chairs, Tiffany lamps, deep-cranberry walls, cue racks, chalks, a triangle of red balls on a perfect green nap. Again, nothing seems in use. Plans were made. Plans abandoned.

“I'm an
old
friend.” I'm barely keeping up. We pass through double doors to a small, expensively lit seafaring chamber—brass-framed charts, brass fixtures, brass telescopes, windlasses, monkeys' fists, boat hooks, belaying pins, fife rails—everything but an oubliette. Plus walls of big blow-up glossies of Eddie on his beloved Tore Holm yawl, the
Jalina
, christened to honor the departed wife and long-ago lost to creditors. Eddie is distinctive (if miniaturized) as the doughty helmsman of the big seventy-footer, bowsprit (or whatever) to the bluster and spray, sails bellied, the commodore in white ducks and shades, deliriously happy, Jalina clutching his shoulders, her straight blondy tresses streaming behind (revealing a
face a bit too small for
her
shoulders). I could never prize anything so much. A career selling houses lets you know you can live with a lot less than you think.

“Okay, lemme just say this,” Finesse says, coming about just as we're about to pass through another double doors, possibly to Eddie's dying room, where his dying days are upon him. Finesse would be
my
choice for nurse when the time arrives—big as a tractor, strong as a bison, bristling with authority and competence, yet also with outsized no-nonsense empathies acquired in a lifetime of shepherding rich white people out of this teary vale with a minimum of bother. Possibly she has a business card.

Finesse's protruding jaundice-y eyes and expansive forehead lean forward at me now as important signifiers. “Mr. Medley is
very
ill. He's 'bout dead.” She elevates her chin, her plush mouth in a tight, pious line to represent 1. Gravity; 2. Respect; 3. Solemnity; 4. Sorrow; 5. Consideration; 6. Submission; 7. Candor; 8. Lament. Plus a hundred inexpressibles that come into play (or might) when we elect to face the final hours of another.

“I know,” I say, meekly. Now that I'm in death's maritime anteroom, I want to be a hundred miles away from it. “Eddie announced he was dying on the radio.”

“Okay. I know 'bout all that foolishness.” Finesse's maximum breasts expand almost audibly against her nurse's
smock, advancing her stethoscope disk out toward me then back again. “But he's happy. He don't mind it. His brain's goin' and goin'. So you don't have to be sorrowing. Because
he's
not.”

“Okay,” I say. “I don't expect to be here long.” I hope. Finesse, I see, wears a thin gold wedding band barely visible deep in her finger flesh. Somewhere there's a Mr. Finesse. Trenton, no doubt. A tough, wiry, agreeable man she bosses around and reminds every day how things are going to be in this world and the next. I can only imagine how much he loves her—all there is to love.

“You stay just as long in there as you want to,” Finesse says. She still has the yellow sponge in hand. “It ain't like you makin' him tired. He's already tired.”

“Okay.”

“Then, here we all go.” She reaches for the knob, pushes back the door to reveal . . . Eddie (I guess) . . . propped up in bed, looking not like Glenn Ford but like a little bespectacled monkey who's reading
The Economist
.

“Who's that?” the tiny creature who might be Eddie says, as if alarmed, his mouth making a shocked, half-open, toothy grimace, his brow furrowing above a pair of reading glasses, his little spidery fingers setting
The Economist
out of the way so he can see. He looks terrifying and terrified. Almost nothing Eddie-ish is recognizable.

“Who you
think
it is?” Finesse says archly. “Yo' ole man-friend who called you up this mornin'.”

“Who?” Eddie croaks.

“It's Frank, Olive.” With overpowering reluctance, I make an awkward step-in through the door, my gaze fixed on him. My mouth and cheeks are working at a smile that won't quite materialize. I stuff my hands in both pants pockets as if they're cold. I'm already doing this badly. I lack the skill set. Who'd want it?

“Now don't start actin' like you don't know who it is,” Finesse says bossily, moving with casual, mountainous authority toward the foot of the metal bed brought in by her hospice team. Part of the death package. Brusquely, she re-situates the metal drip stand Eddie's connected to and that's delivering clear fluid out of a collapsible sachet into a port on the back of his cadaverous left hand. Eddie's covered to his chin in a hospital-blue sheet and is barely detectable beneath it.

“Okay, okay. I know.” He coughs without flailing an arm over his mouth, which would be better.

“And cover up yo' mouth, Mr. Nasty!” Finesse gives the minuscule Eddie a frosty frown, as if he can't hear her.

“I'm not catching,” Eddie's little head says. It's what he said on the phone. His beleaguered eyes dart to me, his smile becoming conspiratorial. He
is
our Olive underneath.

“Who says you wasn't catchin'? I don't know that.”
Finesse puts one large hand behind Eddie's scrawny neck, then another low down on his back and moves him upward onto his slab of pillows like a marionette, revealing bony shoulders, more of his small arms, and a bit of emaciated chest and ribs underneath his hospital smock the same bland, green color as hers. “Sit on up,” she says irritably. “You all scrunched down. How you s'pose to talk to your friend?” Finesse hasn't looked my way since I came in. Eddie is her lookout. Not me. “You can come on and get close to him,” she says—to me—without looking. “He might cough on you, though, so be careful.” She has the sponge tucked under her arm.

“I don't remember you being so goddamn tall,” Eddie croaks, up on his pillows. He is still monkey-ish. I edge closer without wanting or meaning to. The room is a bedroom. Heavy curtains block the windows. Pale outside light seeps around the edges, turning the air greenish. It's possible to think it's three in the morning, not ten
A.M
. Eddie has a gooseneck lamp shining onto where he was reading his
Economist
. His bed is cluttered with books, newspapers, Christmas cards, a copy of
Playboy
, a laptop, a plastic player that pipes music to his ear via a wire, but lying unused on the sheet. A tiny, un-majestic, plastic Christmas tree sits on his bed table, something Finesse has no doubt bought at CVS and brought along. Elsewhere on the bed are scattered a bunch of what look like brochures—the top one proposing “Best Buys in
Kolkata”—as if Eddie was planning a trip. Fike, little Christian brigand, has left behind a shiny pamphlet with a red cross on its front above the words “We Appeal to You.” I've brought nothing, not even my full self.

“Look at
that
shit,” Eddie rasps, his voice clipped and high-pitched after coughing. He's gesturing behind me at two big TVs, bracketed high up, side by side, over the door I just came through and that Finesse is now gliding back out of, saying “Y'all just carry on y'all talkin'. I'll be in here.” Both TVs are going but silent. On one, a group of big smiling white men in business suits and cowboy hats is crowded behind the podium of the stock exchange, soundlessly ringing in another day's choker profits and looking blameless. On the other is an aerial view of The Shore. Surf sudsy. Beaches empty. The famous roller coaster, up to its knees in ocean. Somewhere down there my wife is at present counseling grievers. Possibly everything to a dying man is an emblem of the same thing: it's all a lot of shit.

Eddie's commenced coughing again, though he also seems to be laughing. He's shaking his head, trying to talk. “We don't really achieve much clarity, do we, Basset Hound?” His laughter's encountering serious obstacles down deep. “I don't think . . .” (cough, grind, gag, gulp) “that information's . . .” (last laugh attempt, then the deep “Uh-ooo” groan I heard on the phone) “. . . that information's really power, do you?”

“Maybe not. I haven't thought much about it.”

“Why
would
you?” Eddie manages. “Everybody knows everything. It's probably better.” He subsides back into his bunched pillows and goes silent.

Eddie's the poster boy for death-warmed-over. No one was ever intended to look like Eddie and be breathing—his facial skin gone to parchment, his eyes deep in bony, zombie-sockets, his temples caved. Someone (Finesse) has smeared Vaseline on his clean-shaven cheeks to keep him from what? Drying up? Liquefying? His face glistens evilly. The whole room feels soggy and muggy, the breathable milieu of the soon-to-be-gone. Why did I come here when I could've stayed home, humming Copland and practicing my Narpool? Just because I
could
? That's not good enough.

And where's the mellow-voiced male companion I talked to on the phone? Obviously Finesse has taken his place. I miss him even without knowing him.

On his bed table beside the pathetic plastic Christmas tree, sit cluttered all the odious sick-room implements Eddie needs in order to die better—tissues, a covered metal tray, a silver beaker with a white flexible straw for him to get a sip. Several printed prescription containers. Though there're no resuscitative trappings—no wall defibrillator or electric paddles to stand clear of, no digital gauges to tick off the heart's gradual sink-sink-sink to sayonara. Only a shiny new walker and an empty wheelchair folded into the corner. The
patient's not walking out of here in a better frame of mind.

Eddie, however,
has
also dyed his thick hair as black as tar. Though the dye, something else Finesse grabbed at the CVS, has run below Eddie's hairline, making him look even weirder—worse than he's going to look once he breathes his last. At the end, life does not become him.

Strangely—to me, anyway—just beneath the wall TVs hangs a color picture of Smiley Obama, big teeth white as aspirins, elbows faux athletically tight-in to his skinny ribs, bending forward shaking hands with a small, grinning, gray-haired man who used to be Eddie. Behind them hangs a square red-and-gray banner with MIT Entrepreneurs Club For Barack printed on it. I'm sure Fike took it in.

“So.” Eddie's staring upward at the blank ceiling. He coughs smally, and with his spectral fingers pulls his sheet closer to his chin, straining the tubing to his hand. Possibly he's practicing being a corpse. “How
are
you, Frank?”

“Pretty good,” I say, whispering. Why?

“What're you reading?” Eddie breathes in deeply. A rusty-metal
clank
noise comes out of him, not—it seems—through his mouth.

“I like to read the letters of famous writers,” I say. It's true. “I feel like I'm in on an interesting conversation. I'm reading Larkin's letters to his girlfriend. He was an anti-Semite, a racist, and a cad. I find that pretty interesting.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie grunts. Not interested. Another small cough. “I got this crud flying through that goddamn volcano ash from London a few years ago. Or, who knows, maybe the goddamn hurricane did it. I don't know. Nothing else makes sense.”

I pause. Not likely. “Maybe so.”

Eddie moves his small left foot to the side and out from under his bedsheet. The top of his foot is angrified, dried and scrawny—vestigial. He wiggles his toes and raises his head to give a look and re-affiliate with his foot's existence. For some reason—it's an awful thought—I think of Eddie being helped out of his bed in his gaping green smock (to get to the john) and exposing his awful ass and poor, same-sized dick. I would avert my eyes.

“You wrote a book, didn't you?” Eddie returns his scalded foot to the covers' protection.

“A long time ago,” I say. “Two. I wrote two. I put the second one in a desk drawer and locked it and burned the desk.” Not true but true enough.

“I wonder,” Eddie says, his brow and mouth for a moment relaxed. “I always wonder. I was an engineer.” The past tense naturally fits the moment. “I wonder, when you write a book, how do you know when you've finished it? Do you know ahead of time? Is that always clear? It baffles me. Nothing I did had an end.”

This of course is the question my students used to ask thirty years ago when, for a few fierce months, I taught at a small New England college while my first marriage circled down the drain in the aftermath of our son's death. Why they were interested in that always baffled
me
, since they stood at the bright beginning of their privileged lives, had never finished anything of importance and possibly never would. Eddie is/was (he's both) probably one of those people who wants to know all about everything he's doing at the precise moment he does it. In this case dying.

“Endings always seemed pretty arbitrary to me, Eddie. I wasn't very good at them. I'm not the only person who said so.”

Eddie's little raisin eyes move slowly my way behind his smudged glasses. A look of giddy reproach. He is an awful sight—dyed hair, Vaselined cheeks, Jolly Roger smile of doomed intensity. Though he can still cerebrate and feel reproach. “You mean you just stopped when you felt like it?”

“Not exactly. I asked myself if I had anything more to say—if I'd gotten myself fully expressed. And if the answer was yes, I stopped. You bet. But if I didn't, I kept on putting words down.”