Pharmakon (61 page)

Friedrich was putting Nora’s phone book back in her desk drawer when he caught sight of Zach’s face torn from a magazine.
US? People?
He had not talked to the last of his children since he had accused Zach of stealing three hundred dollars off his dining room table. He had felt bad about that, less so in the few seconds that had passed since he had discovered this photograph Nora had hidden from him.

It showed Zach and a girl of about twenty or twenty-one with very long legs being handcuffed by the police. They’re standing next to the Porsche Zach had been driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Los Angeles when he collided with a police car. The girl was the kind of actress they used to call a starlet. The Porsche had to be hers. If Zach had made that kind of money writing in the last year, Nora or Lucy would have told him.

Zach had not come to Friedrich’s last birthday party, never called or wrote to explain his absence. Friedrich hadn’t wanted the goddamn party, but if he had to suffer through turning seventy-five, the least his youngest son could have done was . . .

Friedrich checked his anger with clinical thought.
Probably
the guilt and anxiety of seeing me and so many people who had
had such high hopes for him prompted Zach’s return to cocaine.
That is, if he ever really gave it up in the first place.
He had told Nora she shouldn’t get her hopes up about Zach’s staying clean. Though the literature indicated 35 percent of cocaine addicts who undergo rehabilitation stay off it for life, Friedrich knew statistics were used mostly to give people false hope.
A case like
Zach has at best a one in ten chance of making a life. Just because
the truth is depressing doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

Friedrich rummaged the drawer for a magnifying glass to get a closer look at the wreckage. The article described Zach as a “screenwriter/novelist.” He had been one once. The magazine said Z had 0.73 gm of cocaine in his possession. Misdemeanor? Friedrich reasoned it was a good thing his son hadn’t rebuilt his career, made any more money writing. If he had, Zach probably would have been arrested for a quantity that would have netted him a felony.

Friedrich peered through the lens of the magnifier like a Victorian detective. The starlet looked scared and had one hand up to hide her face. Zach was smiling for the camera. His hair was greasy, he looked like he had needed a shave two days ago. He was twenty pounds overweight, but it didn’t show. Cameras, at least, were kind to his youngest son.

Friedrich knew enough about showbiz to know the picture of his son’s decline and fall would not have made the glossies if he had been arrested by himself. Zach was described as a “once promising writer.” They misspelled “Friedrich.”

Michael had written by hand across the page, “You better warn Dad.” Nora had neither warned him nor told him, just buried it.

When Friedrich checked the date of the magazine and discovered it was over two years old, he felt tricked. He wondered what else his wife hadn’t told him. Yes, he was wrong to jump to the conclusion that the article was recent, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. Chances were, Zach had gone back to drugs. No question, the statistics supported Friedrich’s lack of faith.

But the fact that he could not be certain about his son’s fate, that he didn’t know for sure why Zach hadn’t come to his goddamn birthday, that he hadn’t a clue where his boy was, both irked and bothered Friedrich. Whose pool house was he hiding in now? Was he alive? Dead? In jail? No, Nora wouldn’t have kept that from him. The most troubling possibility of all was that Z was clean and sober and happy and denying his father the pleasure of knowing it.

Friedrich muttered aloud, “I could still help him, if only he’d . . .” Friedrich didn’t like it when he talked to himself.

He put the clipping back where Nora had hidden it and slammed the drawer shut. An invitation for a psychiatric symposium in Iceland fell to the floor. It had been propped against a framed photo of Zach that was easier to look at. Michael had snapped it fourteen years ago at the publishing party for his first and only novel. Friedrich is standing next to Zach, his arm is around his son’s shoulder. Friedrich fought the urge to dwell on how much better he looked at sixty-two than he did closing on seventy-six, and focused his magnified gaze on his son.

When that picture was taken, he and everybody else thought Zach was in the fast lane to something special. On his way to a success his father could both admire and envy, for he was not in a position to pull any strings to ease his son’s way into the literary world. “Zach’s done it all himself ” was what he liked to say back then.

Now that he looked closely at the pretty picture, he could see the faint white alkaloid caked in his son’s nostrils, the sweaty smile, the glassy mistrust in his son’s eye, not just of his “success” but of himself. Friedrich wasn’t wrong to think he should have known his son was self-medicating, anaesthetising himself for the surgery of life. Friedrich didn’t know if Zach was a case of too much too soon, or not enough too late, but he was certain his boy was damaged long before the shutter clicked on that moment of their lives.

Billie Holiday had finished her last song. “Will . . . Will . . .” In the quiet of the room, the parrot haunted him with Nora’s distant call for help.

The sky had cleared; the sun was shining now. Feeling misled and betrayed by life, Friedrich told himself he’d feel better if he ate something, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Friedrich opened the refrigerator, intending to make an egg-white omelet. Gray stood outside the sliding glass door, hopping on his one good leg and ruffling his feathers. “Will . . .” He heard Nora call, but Gray’s beak was preoccupied with a pumpkin seed. “Will . . . help!”

Nora lay sprawled facedown on the stone steps that led down from the driveway. Her groceries were scattered around her. A roll of toilet paper on the lawn, a broken bottle of vermouth by her head, some frozen peas . . .

She had fallen more than an hour ago. When he ran to her side and tried to help her up, she screamed out in pain. “Don’t!” she wailed.

Friedrich started to take inventory of the damage. Her nose was bloodied. She could move her left leg. At least she wasn’t paralyzed.

“Did you faint?” He was thinking heart attack.

“Goddamnit, I slipped on a slug.”

“What do you think’s wrong?”

“Something’s broken.” His wife’s diagnosis was correct, but incomplete.

Sirens wailed an anxiety-producing duet. Friedrich watched the flashing lights of a police car that led an ambulance up the hill and down his drive. As the first-aid squad lifted her onto the stretcher, Nora winced, then exhaled a long, brittle, staccato moan that made Friedrich think of the timbers of a ship getting ready to snap as it’s driven up onto the rock by a storm.

Trying to concentrate on the wreck at hand, not the one his imagination was serving up inside his head to distract him, Friedrich focused on what was being done to his wife. A blanket was being tucked around her, the straps of the stretcher buckled tight: shrouded like that, she looked as fragile and old as a mummy he had once seen in a museum in Zagreb.

The cop was making notes in his logbook. “What happened?”

“She fell.”

“How?” He said it like he thought somebody had pushed her, like he was responsible.

“She lost her footing.” They were rolling Nora up the path toward the ambulance now. Friedrich watched the boots of the EMS crew trample a row of tulips that would have blossomed pink in a day or two. The gnarled root of a sugar maple jostled the gurney.

Nora threw her head back and closed her eyes to the pain. “Christ.”

Friedrich barked, “Give her two milligrams of morphine.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Yes.”

Nora opened her eyes. “You’re a psychologist, for God’s sake.”

“I can see you’re in pain.”

“Hold my hand; don’t play doctor.”

As he watched them lift her back into the ambulance, he suddenly felt as if he
had
pushed her. “As soon as the doc in the emergency room checks her out, they’ll give her something.”

Friedrich climbed into the back of the ambulance after the stretcher.

“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to get out.”

When Friedrich didn’t move, the other EMS guy said, “It’s the law; no one but the patient and medical staff are allowed in an ambulance.”

“I’m not leaving her alone.” Friedrich used his calm voice on them, but in the back of his brain, the panicky thought had taken hold that if they became separated, if he got out and let them close that door, she would die on him. Nora pulled her hand away when he finally tried to take it.

“He never listens. Just drive.”

“Why are you angry at me?” The ambulance was moving now.

Pain and embarrassment reduced her voice to whisper. “I lay there an hour calling for you.”

“I thought you were the parrot. It was an honest mistake.”

Nora closed her eyes. “You don’t know much about people.”

An hour and a half later, Nora was in a hospital bed down the hall from the emergency room of Morristown Memorial. A hundred milligrams of Demerol had numbed her nervous system, but she still felt like she was in pain. She wondered where the hurt was coming from as Friedrich took out his reading glasses to peer at the X-ray the surgeon was holding up to the light. Was she imagining it? Was it a residue of the shock of her fall? Or was it simply, now that her body was numb, her mind was able to focus on what had always been there?

Her right femur was fractured. The surgeon wanted to operate before the swelling got any worse. “Get in and get out” was how he put it.

Nora could tell her husband didn’t like the surgeon; he was young and had a ponytail. Worse, the young doctor gently pulled the X-rays out of Friedrich’s hands. “Mrs. Friedrich, you have options. But in my opinion, you should take advantage of this opportunity and—”

Friedrich stepped between his wife and the surgeon. “Excuse me, if I could have a word alone with my wife.”

The surgeon took a step back. When Friedrich saw he wasn’t going to leave the room, he bent close to Nora’s ear and whispered, “I’ve made arrangements for you to see a specialist in New York, Hospital for Special Surgery.”

“I have a broken hip. How am I going to get to New York?”

“Helicopter.”

“No. I like him.”

“If he was any good, he’d be practicing in the city.”

Nora peered out from behind her husband. “We’re finished now. What were you saying about my options?”

“We could pin the bone together. But if you’ll look here . . .”—he held up the X-rays and pointed at the ball in the socket of her hip with his forefinger. He had hands like Zach’s— “. . . you can see a narrowing of the joint space. There’s erosion of the bearing surface of the ball of your femur.”

“You mean I’m wearing out.”

“Not all of you.” Friedrich watched them jealously. “But if you’re going to need a hip replacement in five or six years, why not just do it now?”

Friedrich volunteered, “Surgeons always like to cut.” The doctor ignored him.

“Where’s the consent form?”

Friedrich intercepted the consent form as the doctor was handing it to her.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to fix things while they’re still worth fixing. I’ve read the literature on artificial joints. They wear out in ten to twenty years.”

Nora looked at her husband incredulously. “I’ll be ninety-five then.”

“You’ll still be active.”

“Unlike you, I don’t want to live forever.”

“You need another opinion.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“Because it’s my hip, not yours.”

Two hours later, a nurse came in and said, “It’s time.” Friedrich stood in the corner of the room, holding onto his wife’s wedding ring and watch, watching as the nurse put a Versad drip in Nora’s arm. The nurse started to wheel her toward the operating room, then stopped. “Don’t you two want to say good-bye?”

Nora reached out and took her husband’s hand. “Lie down. You look tired.” She was surprised when he kissed her on the lips. As they rolled her down the corridor, she watched him grow smaller and smaller. He gave her a little wave that made her think of a scared child. She was old, numb, broken, and every bit as scared of hospitals as she had been when her appendix burst at age eight. And yet, even as she felt the lights dimming in her consciousness, she was more worried about her husband than she was about herself. Was that love? Nora went under wondering how such an emotion ever evolved.