They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (4 page)

“I’m hungry,” he said. She’d gotten him into his pajamas but not into bed yet. He was in his chair watching television. The TV was on so loud she could feel the vibrations in her stomach. She brought him some ice cream, then canned pears. He smiled at her and asked for toast and tea. She imagined the plastic colostomy pouch puffing, swelling, being pulled off by his big restless hand.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the pouch when she got him settled in bed. “Your colostomy pouch from your surgery.”

“I had surgery?”

“It saved your life.”

Aaron looked away from her. “Some life,” he said with a sigh.

Joy rigged up the bed so that she could strip any wet or soiled sheets from his side without disturbing the king-sized bottom sheet. She put down layers of chux and towels and an extra sheet folded four times. They were not always necessary, he sometimes left the pouch undisturbed. But even then, he himself was disturbed, more and more, by noises, by movements, by Joy. The rustle of the sheets if she turned over, the click of the remote control if she watched TV, even with the sound off. If she got up to go to the bathroom, Aaron started, called out in fear.

Joy got very little sleep, even after she moved onto the lumpy living-room couch. If she was in the bedroom, she startled him and woke him up. If she was not in the bedroom, he woke up disoriented and called for her. She preferred the living-room couch. It gave her the illusion of distance and freedom, and the cushions seemed to fit her tired back perfectly. She slept like a cat, listening, curled in a ball, one eye half open. When her husband called, she woke immediately and leaped up. She did not slink gracefully from the room like a cat. She shuffled in her slippers and made small distressed murmurs, turning on lamps, holding the wall for balance. Sometimes, after soothing Aaron or getting him ginger ale or cleaning him up, she would be too tired to go back to the couch and she would fall asleep at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, as tired as she was, she couldn’t get back to sleep until morning. Those pre-dawn hours were excruciating at first. She paced and fretted and prayed for sleep. But after a few nights like that, she realized what a gift she was being given. She spread herself out on the couch and read whatever novel happened to be lying around. The time became precious to her. It was too late for anyone to still be out and too early for anyone to be out yet. The streets were hushed.

7

Joyful, Joyful, Aaron whispered. Their fingers were entwined. They lay on the cool sand. An orange moon hung dreamily on the horizon. We will visit every island on earth, Aaron said. We will go to Iceland and Corfu and Tahiti and Orkney and the Isle of Mull. We’ll live in Tasmania and Ischia.

Long Island will do, Joy said.

There once was a man from Nantucket, Aaron said.

Poetry!

And the moon rose above them, growing smaller and paler as the night grew darker.

8

“My father is very ill,” Molly said to the woman next to her on the plane.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m going to New York to see him.”

“I’m sure that will do him good.”

Will it? Molly wondered. She thought of Daniel so many years ago, when he was so ill. He was just a kid, eighteen, younger than Ben, her son, was now. Younger than Ben and in the hospital for so long, almost a year. Then in a wheelchair for months. How had he stood it? The way he stood everything, she supposed—by ignoring it. Had it helped Daniel, had it “done him good” when Molly came home from college to sit with him in his hospital room? She had tried to entertain him, telling him amusing stories, family gossip. She’d read the newspaper to him, brought him milkshakes, too. And she’d given him novels,
Lucky Jim
,
A Handful of Dust
, which he was too sick to read. Did any of that “do him good”? There he’d been in his hospital bed, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, squinting against the smoke, smiling at her, laughing at her funny stories, but when it came time to leave, she’d see his eyes sink back into their blank gaping stare of pain. Oh, she’d had some good fights with the nurses about his painkillers, such as they were, not that anyone cared what a college girl said. Their mother had been even fiercer, but still the doctors refused to give him sufficient pain medication, insisting it was too addictive for a teenaged boy.

So had her visits done Daniel any good at all? Would this visit to her father do
him
any good? Would it restore his short-term memory? Would it give him back his strength, his balance, so he could walk? Would it replace the colostomy bag with his own intestine? Would it make him healthy, would it make him whole?

“You’re such an absolutist,” Freddie had once said to her, and she had said, “Yes. That is the goal, at least.”

As soon as she got to New York she would call her parents’ various doctors. She would organize all their medications in little plastic boxes labeled with the days of the week. She would order a lamp with a high-wattage bulb for reading, a telephone with big buttons and an extra-loud ring. She would put all their bank accounts online and arrange for deposits and payments to be made automatically. She would set up Spotify and program it to endlessly play Frank Sinatra.

She said these things to herself to make herself feel better, but she knew what would really happen. Neither her father nor her mother would be able to decide which doctor she should speak to or find their phone numbers. The medications she organized would be the ones they no longer took. There would be no place to plug in the new lamps with their bright lightbulbs, every outlet in the apartment, and there weren’t many, sporting frayed extension cords already overloaded. They would change the appointments she did manage to arrange for them without telling her. Every television in the apartment, and there were too many, would not work. The radio would play only static, loudly. And then there was the computer.

“Why did you even talk to someone who called out of the blue and said he was from Microsoft?” she would ask her mother.

“Because he said he was from Microsoft.”

“Mom, Microsoft doesn’t call people like that to say your computer has a virus. They never call anyone. They don’t even answer calls. It doesn’t work like that.”

“They said it was urgent.”

It wasn’t Joy’s fault that an entirely new paradigm of communication and commerce had developed in her later years. Molly would say, “Okay, Mom. No harm done. As long as you didn’t give them any information.”

“Of course not! Just my name. I think just my name. Oh god, what if I gave them something else? Like my credit card number?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. How can I remember everything like that? He asked me so many questions.”

And her mother, her inspiring, unflappable, competent, hardworking, distinguished mother, would berate herself, berate the modern world, then sigh helplessly. “I don’t know why Microsoft called in the first place,” she would say. “I really don’t.”

Molly sat in the taxi from the airport anticipating Central Park, heavy and loamy and full of autumn. As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK: a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace. She opened the cab’s bleary window and breathed in the lights and the skyscrapers, the sky lit from below, the river.

The taxi driver popped the trunk and pulled her bag out for her. Before she could grab it, the doorman was already rolling it beneath the canopy to the door. When Molly was growing up here, the doormen were such a normal, essential part of her life. She had never really gotten used to living without doormen. They always knew where your parents were, when they’d be home, if the dog had been walked, if your brother had friends with him—an early alert system for family life. If you lost your keys, they let you into the apartment. They handed you packages. They told you the mailman had come when you were waiting for college acceptances and refusals. When she was little she had loved their uniforms with their names stitched on the chest, their smart hats like policemen’s hats, but unlike a policeman, they picked you up and swung you through the air and lent you a quarter if you needed it for candy. She’d known some of them, the older ones, for what seemed like her whole life.

“Hi! Hi! It’s so good to be here!” she said, then realized she did not actually know this particular doorman and had greeted him too warmly. He did look familiar, perhaps because of a strong resemblance to Mussolini. Squat head, square jaw, wide frown. He was probably too young to know who Mussolini was. The name stitched on his uniform was Gregor.

“The Bergmans,” she said. “I’m their daughter. I have a key. They’re expecting me.”

A novel by James Patterson was spread-eagled on the console. He glanced at it longingly as they went to the elevator, saying, “Your mother will be glad to see you.” He spoke in a heavy, clouded voice, just as she would have expected a Mussolini look-alike to speak, though the accent was wrong, Eastern European. “She’s had a rough night.”

“Is she okay? Did something happen?”

“Oh,” said Gregor, and he cleared his throat. “
She’s
fine, but…”

“My father? Oh god. What happened?”

The elevator doors opened.

“They’re both home, safe and sound,” Gregor said as the doors closed.

Home? Of course they were home. Where else would they be at midnight?

Molly burst through the door, unlocked as always. “Mom! Mom! What’s going on?”

Her mother was lying on the couch in the living room, though Molly had trouble locating her at first, she was so swaddled in down. A down comforter, a down robe beneath it, down booties, and, which was new to Molly, a down hood. “I’m here,” the little face said. “I’m fine, darling.”

“But Daddy?”

“I’m trying to warm up. What a night. Your father is okay now, back in bed where he belongs.” She took a sip of water from a paper cup on the side table. Why did she use paper cups? Molly wondered. To make the apartment seem more like a hospital?

“I was reading, I guess I fell asleep—”

“Mom?”

“A really deep sleep, which I have not had in weeks, believe me. I checked on your father at ten, before I went to bed. I made sure he went to the bathroom to pee, I checked the colostomy pouch…”

Oh, please spare me those particular details, Molly thought guiltily, knowing her mother could not spare herself those details.

“And he was comfortable and quiet. So I came back here to my nest.”

It did not look like a nest, that undulating pile of pillows and comforters, more like an avalanche from which long-lost hikers might at any moment emerge, shaking themselves off, wondering how they ended up in this Manhattan living room. “And?” Molly said, rather sharply, moving her hands in circles as if to speed things up.

Perhaps, Joy thought, Molly’s authoritarian nature came along with the work she did, a professional hazard, like Marie Curie being exposed to radiation. Molly was exposed to so many pottery shards. They were not radioactive, but there were so many and they were minuscule and each one might turn out to be the important one, but who could tell, they were so small and filthy, and so you had to gather them up as if they were diamonds, then separate them, then put them back together again. Well, you would have to be officious, wouldn’t you, with all those shards depending on you? Joy had been so proud when Molly decided to study archaeology, when she got her Ph.D., when she went off to Turkey to dig up ancient pots. It was like an Agatha Christie novel. It was like Agatha Christie’s life with her archaeologist husband, minus a husband, of course, but that was another story. You had to clean the dug-up bits and pieces with a soft toothbrush like the ones for people with diseased gums. This thought always made Joy shudder, as if the pottery shards were in fact old decayed teeth. Then the discoveries, such as they were, would have to be labeled on bits of paper like the slips in a Chinese fortune cookie. Then they would end up buried again, in drawers in a university or museum, never to see daylight for another thousand years or so. No wonder Molly was always trying to organize Joy. She even tried to organize her own body, stretching this muscle, strengthening that one. If Molly could number the hairs on her head, Joy was sure she would, she was so busy trying to order the world. She had been the same as a child, not particularly obsessive or compulsive, although she did refold her clothes when Joy brought them up from the laundry room, come to think of it. But it was more a show of strength, this insistence on order, her own order, a demand rather than a need.

That would keep anybody busy, never mind her job. Look at her, poor dear, so antsy-pantsy. She was looking good, though. Fit. Always fit. An obsession. There were worse obsessions. She resembled her father with that long face. Sculptural, Joy liked to think, though others might call it craggy. The face was frowning ferociously now. Of course! Joy hadn’t told her about Aaron yet. No wonder! “Where was I? Oh, I came here into the living room and I read a little and then I must have fallen asleep—”

“Mom!” Molly snapped. “Could you just tell me what actually happened, for god’s sake?”

Her mother glared at her and snapped back: “Your father got out of bed and pulled his urine-soaked pajama pants and adult diaper down around his ankles and went out, like that, with his urine-soaked pajamas and adult diaper around his ankles, into the elevator to the lobby, okay? The doorman brought him back.”

“Jesus.”

“
Gregor
—Jesus retired last year. All right? Okay? Direct enough for you, Molly? Delivered quickly enough? Sorry I was not as concise as you would have liked. I’m sorry I didn’t describe your father’s humiliation with the clarity and alacrity you demand…”

Molly sank onto the downy couch beside her mother. “Oh, Mom,” she said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

They sat like that for a while, quiet, together, and she snuggled against her mother, then went into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin. He had aged since she last saw him, not that long ago despite her mother’s admonitions, two months. But Aaron, breathing noisily, his face otherwise so still, looked old, like an old, old man. Molly kissed his forehead.