The Child (15 page)

“I thought things were supposed to change.”

“Who told you things changed?” Mary was sleeping. It was like typing. Mary could sleep and talk at the same time.

“I saw it on TV. It’s better for homosexuals now.”

Mary laughed in her sleep. “Right, on TV everything is better. Turn off the set, though, and it’s the same old shit.”

Eva tried to close her eyes.

“Ilene, I’m sleeping,” Mary said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

But Eva knew they wouldn’t. In the morning she would call Dr. Gita Kumar and make an appointment. Then, perhaps, a whole new world would begin.

Eva lay in the darkness. Some birds started to sing outside the window. That meant the sun was coming up, and when she looked, she could see the leaves emerging quietly from the weedy trees outside on her street. Her block would soon start to come and go. There was a decent beauty about her life. Something elegant and great. Whatever happened at Dr. Kumar’s she could handle it, because Eva Krasner was loved.

Turning in off the street there was a rehearsed, polished gleam in the refurbished lobby and then emotional chaos in the dingy elevators and hallways. That’s what entering a hospital repeatedly is like. As the visitor nears the room, she engages the realm of faintly rotten, lukewarm, bad food and the undertones of fuzzy television sets with afternoon talk shows. Visitors are numb, and patients weak. Workers are underpaid, doctors distracted.

The first thing Eva did when she arrived at Hockey’s hospital room was to give him a kiss on his dried-out lips and look slowly into his eyes. They were as inflamed as bloody sunsets.

“It’s the experimental drugs that they infused me with in the office,” Hockey said. “The dosage was too high and they poisoned my eyes.”

He had the same impassive expression he had always had when he was in the hospital all the previous times over the many years. But now that he was supposedly better, it was a bit harder to take.

“I have to dilate my pupils every two hours so that if by some chance they freeze, they will freeze open.”

“Oh, I get it.” Eva took off her coat. “Then what are they going to do?” She unloaded all of her legal papers and scratch pads from her huge briefcase.

“Then they’ll try again with a lower dose. I can read, but slowly, with a magnifying glass.”

“That’s okay, I’ll read to you. Can I use the phone?”

Eva dialed and was now pushing the various voice mail buttons.
All the speed-up engendered by computers, faxes, and phone machines was slowed down by the impossibility of dialing one number and speaking to one person. She tried a shortcut by pressing “0,” hoping to outwit her historical moment and actually get a real person. But of course the system outwitted her and she had to start all over again.

“Sure. The thing is, they claim they can stabilize my eyes with lower doses, but how can they do that if they already did this?”

“How can they?” Then she pointed to the phone. “I’m on hold.”

Eva didn’t bother Hockey with her life, but she had been on hold for weeks trying to get through to her insurance company. Dr. Kumar was nice on the phone, but very expensive. Eva couldn’t even schedule the examination until she knew for sure what the insurance company would do about it.

“I mean, I’m already at the end of the pipeline,” Hockey said placidly. “There’s nothing left that works for me, so I have to try anything new, no matter how toxic. Why aren’t you shocked? I know the answer to that question.”

“But are you still better than you were?”

“Yeah. Don’t you think so?”

“I think you are.” Being on the phone was no obstacle to conversation these days. Most people holding phones to their ears were actually on hold.

“I am. I’m better. I guess so. Much better. Lucky to be alive, I guess.” Hockey shrugged in his pajamas.

“Okay.” Eva shifted receiver shoulders. “Let’s just pick up where
we left off last time, and if the insurance company ever answers this phone call, I’ll just deal with it then.” She sat back in the visitor chair, receiver scrunched on her shoulder, going through her notes. “I want to argue
selective prosecution
. That if David had been involved in an intergenerational
heterosexual
relationship, the courts would not be asking for twenty-five years. In fact, if Stew had been involved with an older woman, in most situations his family would be winking and patting him on the back.”

“Better be careful there,” Hockey said, groping on the nightstand for his sippy cup of water. “If the judge can locate one case where some straight person got punished, your argument goes out the window.”

“I’m ahead of you. I found the Miller case. A thirteen-year-old boy had sex with his forty-year-old female teacher and impregnated her. The courts sent her to prison. But, Hockey, can the judge really use that case against us? Stew is fifteen, not thirteen. No one got pregnant, and David wasn’t his teacher.”

Hockey was methodically trying to find the cup.

“Obviously this straight person was way out of line,” Eva continued, allowing him the achievement of finding it himself. “Miraculously she got punished, probably because it was a woman. That doesn’t mean blaming two guys for being in love is fair just because one way-out straight woman got punished, too.”

“I know. Where’s my water?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Thanks.”

“But it’s hard for the judge to see the differences.” Eva watched Hockey with concern but stayed blasé. “They’re always looking
for the one extreme exception to prove that homophobia doesn’t exist.”

“They don’t understand comparisons. Like how I’m comparatively better.”

“Yeah,” Eva said. “You know, those judges think they’re being fair if they rule half the time for landlords and half the time for tenants. But the landlords are wrong ninety percent of the time. The nuances of justice are what elude most people.”

The nurse’s aide, Mrs. Hernandez, came in with Hockey’s lunch on a tray. He smiled and waited politely until she left the room. That was one skill all frequent hospital-goers quickly learn–to find out the names of the aides, how the TV works, how to move the food tray, where to store his wallet.

“Should we bring in experts? Get that food away from me, the smell will make me throw up.”

“Okay, here–hold the phone.” She handed over the receiver and moved the tray. “What about the fruit? You might want it later.”

“Okay, leave it on the windowsill.”

Eva wheeled the food out into the hallway. “God, Jose left you great insurance.”

Una Owens, another aide, came in to change Hockey’s sheets.

Throughout his illness, Hockey was constantly horrified at the way that black people and Latin people had to clean up his shit, serve his food, and administer his medication. He didn’t want to be in that position, and yet when push came to shove, here he was. When Jose died, his whole family was in the hospital every day, speaking Spanish to the Dominicans on staff. It made everything easier. They knew each other’s relatives and talked a lot about old
friends and new. But now that Jose was gone…. If Hockey was sick at home, he did everything himself, even if it took hours. But once you’re in the hospital, that’s it. There are servers and served, especially for people with decent insurance. The end.

Eva stood out in the hallway with the phone cord pulled tight. She couldn’t go anywhere, but she wanted to leave Mrs. Owens and Hockey some privacy. She looked out down the hall at the faraway window. There was the East River and FDR Drive. She wanted a cigarette. She was still on hold. There must be some way to show the judge what homophobia looked like so that he would be able to recognize it in this case. But it was so difficult to represent. Any judge with a TV had seen some representation of homosexuality. But nothing showed the homophobia. That’s what she and Hockey really needed. The only movies she could think of were the ones where the person who hurts the gay guy turns out to be a repressed homosexual himself. That wouldn’t work. It let straight people off the hook.

Your call is important to us….

Mrs. Owens finished her tasks and Eva stepped back into the room. Hockey was depressed, she could tell. He was still, depleted. He couldn’t see. The sadness was so familiar. The resignation like old times.

Please do not hang
. ... “Hello? This is Shelley speaking.”

“Oh my God, Shelley? Don’t hang up. Do you know that I have been trying for six days to get someone on the phone?” Eva could never move from one disaster to the next. She wanted justice for all of them.

“Can I help you?”

Shelley was already annoyed.

“It’s this letter I got from you. I might need to have a surgical biopsy, and I’m trying to figure out the cost.”

“Well, do you need it or not? If you don’t need it, we won’t reimburse.”

“Well, I can’t go to the doctor to find out if I need it until I find out how much of that visit would be covered. You see, it’s a Catch-22.”

“What’s that? A diagnostic code?”

“No, an expression from the sixties. According to your letter, my doctor’s fee of three thousand dollars would be reimbursable for twelve hundred dollars? The facility fee of four thousand dollars would be reimbursable for six hundred? What kind of insurance in that?… All right.” She sighed.

Hockey was dilating his pupils. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m back on hold. It’s so hard for people to conceptualize beyond their task.”

“I just had a revelation.”

“What is it? That I need new insurance?”

“No. We won’t get justice by showing the unfairness,” Hockey said, holding the dropper over his eyes. “Because they can’t see things that way. If we bring in five thousand examples of men being severely punished for sex with consenting minors and they have one case of a straight woman sent to the slammer, then we lose. But we would deserve to lose, because we’re appealing to a sense of justice that isn’t there. We’re hallucinating. It’s wishful thinking. We’re deluded….”

“And therefore…?”

“We have to appeal to their egos, not their hearts. Our truth is too difficult to explain.”

“Oh shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Fucking Shelley disconnected me. She disconnected me.” Eva sat down on the bed. “Do you have room under the covers?” She hung up the phone and lay back on his pillow.

“You know, Hockey, I feel so insecure about so many things. I cringe at the end of every day. I never know how to act. I have trouble making the right decisions. But there’s one thing I really know, and that’s the law. I think if you really work with the truth and you’re fucking smart, you can win. And I really, really want to know what it’s like to win.”

She kicked off her shoes and threw her feet up on the bed.

“Maybe it’ll be fun,” he said, lying back to join her. “Pass me those canned pears, will you? I guess I’m feeling better.”

Brigid was afraid of what she would find when she got back from work. On the other hand, she hoped that Marty had taken care of everything. That he’d called Wisotscky and that Stew was already out of the house. She would have stayed home and packed Stew’s stuff, but she couldn’t miss another day. Mr. Soto had made that very clear. He needed her, since she was the only one who knew how the invoice system worked. Those days off she’d taken because of the Stew thing were screwing up everybody on the job, and they had let her know about it one, two, three. Threatening to bring in computers. Those computers were the devil; they ruined everybody’s life.

When she walked in the TV was on. That was a good sign; it meant Marty was home. For one year she had walked in every night to nothing. Nothing. She came up the walk, turned her key in the lock, and heard nothing. There was no point in even going in the house after that. It would just be another night of desolation. That year while Marty was gone, all day at work she’d dream of coming home and hearing the TV on, then she’d be there and it would be off. She spent many hours sitting on the front step weeping, unable to enter. Or crashed in a chair at the dinette set, sleeping in her coat, clutching her keys.

But now the TV was on, Marty was home waiting for her. Her man was home for good.

“Hi, honey,” Brigid said. He looked so young, like when he first came back from Cambodia. “Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know where Stew is. He never came home. I took the day off to talk to him, like we said. I wasted the whole fucking day here and he never came home. What, he just ran out the door?”

“I told you. When Carole confronted him about Victor, he just ran out the door.”

“Well, I don’t know where he’s been all night.”

“Did you eat?”

“I microwaved that meatloaf.”

“Good, it was for you.”

Brigid went into the kitchen and helped herself to some food. Then she opened a Diet Coke and came back into the living room.

“What are you watching?”

“Some crap.”

She hoped Stew would go out and earn his fortune. Meet a nice girl, get married, have kids. Someday they’d all drive up in a big car for Thanksgiving and everything would be all right. She’d cook a big ham. She and Marty couldn’t help him; he had to get out of there and do it on his own, get a job. He was big enough. She had worked when she was just a kid. It’s normal.

“Marty?”

“Yeah?”

“They hired a new manager today and it wasn’t George.”

“Why not?”

“Because of his drinking. I told you. So guess who got it?”

This was the life she loved. Coming home from work to the sound of her husband’s TV. Eating dinner together, talking over their day. She’d worked all her life for this.

“Who?”

“Guess!”