The Man Who Cried I Am (29 page)

“I'll tell you when I see you.”

“No! What is it?” Regina's voice was instantly demanding, startlingly harsh, as if some instinct had signaled her that a diaster had occurred.

“When I see you,” Max said tensely.

“Goddamn it, you're not going to see me, Max! Now what is it? Is it about Bob?”

Max was stung. “Later, Regina.”

She crashed on, “What's happened? Where's Bob? What's this all about? Max,
tell me!
” Her voice was now a scream so loud that Max moved the phone away from his ear.

“Bob's in the hospital. In a coma, honey—”

“Aw,
no!
”

“Reg—”

“
When?
”

“Reg—”

“
When? Where?
”

“Reg, it was sudden. His wife couldn't wake him this morning. She called the doctor and they took him to the hospital. He's been there ever since. He'll be all right.”

“He's not! He's going to die!”

Then Max saw it. She
wanted
him to die for the torment he had caused her, and this realization was tearing at her as brutally as the fact that he
was
dying.

“He was
with
me last night,” Regina said. “We made love! He had a sore throat …” She wanted him to die and now he was dying. She had put that pussy on him and it killed him, finally. That weapon they have, the women. There was nothing else to do at the paper. Max left Regina's number at the desk and took a taxi to her house.

Regina cried at his side while he called the hospital and got a report. “Condition serious.” Well, it wasn't critical yet, Max thought. But they lied to you. Nobody's going to lie to me when my time comes, if I know it's coming.

[Now that I know, Max thought to himself in Leiden, I try lying to myself.]

He held Regina in this arms. It was kind of stupid, that, but it was Man perhaps a million and three quarters of a thousand years old since Zinjanthropus sat around with his bereaved while they cried. Some people laughed and danced to keep from crying. Max remembered some of the wakes he had gone to as a very young man, when everyone came in with cake or potato salad or hams or fried chicken, barbecued spare ribs or cole slaw or macaroni salad, and whiskey. Then came the music and the slow drags and the Lindy Hops, the boogie woogies. The older people, they'd sing, “Didn't He Ramble,” but maybe in the next room that corpse wasn't going to ramble anymore.

“It just can't
be!
” Regina kept saying. Her love for Bob should have kept him strong and incapable of dying? Regina, he thought, we should be wise now. This is a time for setting precedents, you and I. We should be making love, stone screwing and drinking and playing records and screwing some more, and eating; it is a time for letting those who are going to die, die. But there is that weakness bred up in us. We must pause to mourn, reflect on dying. Except in war. Then you want to get away fast from the place where the dying is done.

“No, no,
no.
” Regina sobbed, smashing her foot against the floor. Mad at God, Max thought. Mad at Jews who get themselves gassed and mad at the ones who escaped. Mad at Bob for not wanting her badly enough to throw out his wife and four kids, and now mad at him because he is dying and she had told him to his face (she was saying now, mucus and tears strewn through her hair) that she wished he were dead. Max led her to the bathroom and washed her face, dug the cloth into those deep, grief-carved creases that had suddenly lined her face. He opened her medicine cabinet and asked what pills she wanted to take. She gestured toward the blue-capsuled sodium amytal. “How many do you usually take?”

“Two,” she said in her shattered voice.

Max gave her three, then sat in her room while she undressed in the bathroom and readied for bed. Once he had known what it felt like to lie in her bed, to pad barefoot from the bathroom to the kitchen to put up coffee or to make a sandwich. She came out of the bathroom, her face bare of makeup, as if she had gone into mourning. She got into bed and let Max pull the covers up. “Call me if you need to,” Max said.

“Thanks. Thank you, Max,” she said drowsily. He closed the door to the apartment and heard the lock snap behind him. He hoped she wouldn't call in the middle of the night, but who else was she going to call? Could she say she was crying over a guy who was dying when he left her in bed? Could she tell anyone who the guy was? No. She would have to go back to the beginning, the way she had with Max. That would mean telling of trips when Bob, using business as an excuse, met her in the Catskills where they fished in a small lake at night and Bob tried to imitate the whippoorwill's cry, or met her in the little hotel in Taxco where, with the sun setting, all the mountains of Mexico, harsh and grim during the day, turned soft, and the vultures on their last flights through the valleys had not seemed repulsive at all? Could she tell about meetings and bag lunches and long, arm-in-arm walks along the promenade of Carl Schurz Park? Could she tell of begging Bob to impregnate her and how, untrusting of her then, he had not seen her for three months?

What Max hadn't heard before, he heard that night and there had been so many times when, in genuine anger, he wanted to ask: Why, why, do you hurt yourself so? But he knew the answer and that made the question invalid. He called her the next morning, then called the hospital for another report. Condition: “Serious.” Still under oxygen, of course. Bob needed the oxygen to retard further damage to the brain. The sore throat he had complained of had been a broken vessel in his head, spurting a steady stream of blood against the back of his throat. Max reported to Regina, then dressed and took a taxi to her apartment and made her eat. The tears had not stopped and she had not slept. Twenty-four hours ago, Max thought, she had been her usual lovely self. Today, she looks ugly and a thousand years old. Could I have ever broken my neck to get into bed with this? Regina wanted to go to the hospital and Max became angry.

“Don't be a stupid broad all your life, Reg. What about his wife and kids? His sisters and brothers and his parents? What have you to do with any of that? All they need right now is you running in there screaming all over the place.”

The tears, the body-shaking sobs, the forlorn body, sexless now, the gray eyes transformed into two wild, red balls, the brown hair like damp, stained straw. Max, watching her, thought, Those rotten little truths. He could almost hear them strike her, see her body recoil from them. He reached across to her and held her. “I'm sorry,” he said at last, thinking, World, look at this tableau. Look, world. We suckle your babies, clean your kitchens and shithouses, gave you all the blackertheberry your men ever wanted, take all the jobs you don't want, fight in your wars and now you want us to stop short of loving and consoling your women too? “Try to call your office, Reg. Come on, now. When this is all over you won't want to have lost your job. If it happens bad—” He paused. But some preparation was necessary. “—the job'll be good to have. You'll appreciate having something to do, some place to go.” He listened while she talked on the telephone. When she returned she said, “I suppose you have to go?”

“Yes.”

She started crying again, then silently, mouth pursed into a pout, until the scream burst from her trembling, tightened lips. “Oh, Max, what in the hell am I going to
do
?”

Max remembered the endlessly long days after Lillian's death; he remembered watching the sun come up and its light fill the room in which he slept, and he remembered the way it had eased down at the end of the day when the radios and voices, the slamming doors of the other apartments, jarred his being, made him think for the first time of the living. How had the fat couple on the second floor made love to each other? Was the tall, skinny, light-skinned woman on the first floor a good lover? Why did the guy beneath him laugh so much and so loudly? Much of the emptiness had remained, sometimes it hurt, at other times it merely ached. Remembering, Max took Regina in his arms and tucked her head onto his shoulder. His own eyes began to water and he held her tightly to him so that she might not spring free before he had a chance to blink the tears away.

He left soon afterward and went wearily to the
Century
office where he spent the balance of the day plodding through work. He paused only to call the hospital and to call Regina, who now demanded that Max call Bob's doctor and get an up-to-date prognosis. Max did not pass that along to Regina. The doctor did not hold out any hope whatsoever for Bob's recovery. Just as well, Max thought. The brain's going to jelly now, or parts of it. Better off dead. When Max was about to leave the office in the early evening, he called Regina to tell her to dress so they could go out and eat. He called the hospital once again. Now it was, “Condition critical.”

Max rang Regina's doorbell and heard her inside running to open the door. “He's dead!” she screamed into the empty hall.

Max pushed her inside. “No, he's not. I just called the hospital before I left the office. His condition's critical, but he's still alive.”

“No, goddamn it, no. He is dead, I tell you, dead, dead, dead!”

It was no good trying to reason with her. Max called the hospital and asked for Bob's doctor again. He hung up slowly. Puzzled, he said aloud, “‘Why would they say ‘critical' when he's already dead?” Reg must have felt it and called. Max took her arm. “C'mon, we're going to get something to eat.”

“I don't want to eat!” She tore away from him.

Max sighed. “Reg, I'm very tired and you look pretty bad. Let's eat; this'll all wear a little better. After all, what can you do now?”

She wiped her eyes. “All right, Max. I appreciate all this. I'll try to be good, honest. But it's so hard …” The tears again, then down the elevator, the hot night greeting them as they stepped into the street. She held him tightly as if she might lose him. She staggered against him sometimes and he would mutter, “Straighten up, baby, straighten up, Reg. That's better.”

He did not remember where they ate, but he remembered the walk back to her home. She held him tightly, as before, and bumped against him again. Her face chased grief and anger, anger and grief. Max heard her grinding her teeth; he caught the saw's-teeth sound of the sobs she could not suppress, but she did not give way altogether until they were in the elevator. Upstairs he placed her on her bed and called her doctor, as she had asked. He handed her the phone and listened to her talking. She was asking the doctor to call the place where she usually went. “Will you help me pack a few things, Max? I know you're tired, but I would appreciate it if you just dropped me off at the little hospital. I feel so tired, I'd be afraid to try, myself.”

“Sure,” Max said. He got down a bag for her and watched her comb her hair and put makeup on. Looking in the mirror she said, “Shea. He was the only person I ever met who was weaker than me, and I was happy. I could see Bob, fading into just a memory. I could have helped Shea—Kermit, but he broke it off. Didn't want to be weaker than me. He could have helped me too, because I need to be able to help someone, not always be helped. That's important—” She glanced at him in the mirror and spun around. “Oh, Max! Don't look so sad.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Do you know something? Whenever I fall sick, I feel dirty. This time, Max, I just feel tired, not dirty at all, just so tired I could sleep for a thousand years.” She drew back as if a thought had just occurred to her. “Before we go, should we make love, just once more, to say goodbye to the old Regina? I really feel something else, Max. I mean it. Would you?”

And Max looked at her carefully. No hysteria, no blankness. An earnestness, an innocence even. “I am very tired, baby.”

“Yes. I'm sorry. Not about the offer, but because I made you tired. Max?”

“Yeah?”

“I don't really know anyone else who would have done for me what you've done.”

“Forget it.”

At the small, East Side hospital, Max walked her to the door, carrying her bag. He rang the bell and a nurse answered. “Hello, Regina.” The nurse was silhouetted in the door in her white uniform.

“Hello, Collins,” Regina answered. “In for the last time, sweetie, so don't fuss over me.” Max kissed her on the cheek, then on the mouth and returned to the waiting taxi. The door to the little hospital closed with a
bam!

17

LEIDEN

Bam! Max jumped in the bed, his mouth agape, his hands held protectively in front of him. Slowly, the bedroom in Leiden came back into focus. Max lowered his hands. What in the hell is scaring me besides the cancer? That I know about. It's something I don't know. He looked at the floor where Harry's briefcase had fallen and its brass fittings had clattered on the oaken floor.

“Max! Max!”

He heard Michelle racing up the steps. She burst through the door, her eyes sweeping the room in fright. “Are you all right? I heard something fall.”

Max pointed to the briefcase. She said, “Oh, I was frightened. Haven't you started on the papers yet?”

“No, I've been drowsing. I'll get to them in a minute.”

“If you need me,” Michelle said, “just call.” There was something in her eyes Max saw, something familiar, knowing, like Mildred's eyes had been when she knew she was going to leave him. Like Regina's eyes when she knew even their friendship was over. “Max,” Michelle said. She had been about to close the door.

“Yes.”

She simply stared at him, pityingly.

“Yes,” he repeated.

“It is nothing.” She closed the door gently, almost reverently, as if someone were dead in the room. She knows, Max thought. She's thought about the smell. Max retrieved the briefcase from the floor and unlocked it. He took out a yellowing envelope addressed to Harry in Paris. He took the letter from the envelope and scanned it, then paused at the signature. Theodore Dallas. Max knew Dallas; he had been with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. A blond Negro with blue eyes, a Democrat who managed to secure some important positions. The letter was dated two years ago. Max read and reread the letter. It seemed friendly. He set the letter aside, then removed the contents from the case and saw that the packets were numbered. He removed the packet numbered “I.” In the distance he heard a train rushing toward the station he had passed trying to find Michelle's house. Max placed a pillow beneath his buttocks to ease the throbbing pain and opened the packet.