Want Not (37 page)

For the very briefest of moments, she skimmed the throng of products on the shelves, feeling assaulted by the profusion, all those brand names (First Response; Answer; Clearblue; E.P.T.) leaping at her, shouting
Pick me
in voices so blaringly strident she felt sure the whole store could hear. She couldn’t do it. Panicking, she spun around, and found herself staring squarely at a shelf of enemas which immediately brought to mind her sorta-kinda best friend Gus, and which, under any other circumstances, would’ve caused her to laugh aloud. (“Sorta-kinda” best friend because ever since eighth grade they’d maintained a cycle of falling out with each other then reuniting then falling out again.) As a sophomore, Gus had pioneered the use of vodka enemas which he claimed got you drunk immediately and couldn’t be detected by a Breathalyzer or by his mom’s regular demands to smell his breath when he’d roll in on the weekends. Gus was big on shocking people—he sometimes wore flowery vintage dresses to school, played bass in an otherwise all-girl Lo-Fi Goth band called the Date Rapes, faked epileptic seizures when he was bored in class—but broadcasting his use of alcohol enemas had been, as even he admitted, an error: his fame had gotten so out-of-control that even incoming freshmen knew him for his enemas, and he couldn’t go to the bathroom at a party without someone breaking in with a cellphone camera, hoping to catch him in the act, even though he’d abandoned the practice after about half a dozen woozy times. That fame was yet another reason Gus couldn’t wait to get to New York City, where he’d been accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology and was planning a triple career as a musician, reality-TV star, and designer of punk-inspired clothing he intended to market worldwide under the “Gussy” label. He was as dead set on her going to Richard Varick College as she was, to study finance like her dad had done. Gus said she could manage all the numbers for Gussy, be his chief operating officer (“I’ll be your boo, you’ll be my coo”), which despite her smiling assent was not in her planbook. She saw Goldman Sachs on the menu.
Had,
anyway. Now this. Now the maybe-this. God, she wished Gus was here right now, ordering her to chill, promising her it’d all be okay. But this—this was too fucked-up, even for Gus.

Noting the pharmacist’s return, she plucked a box of laxatives from the shelf above the enemas—Dulcolax, her regular brand—and stood there awhile, reading the text on the package.
Active ingredient: Bisacodyl USP.
How could this be happening to her?
Also contains: Hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Who could she possibly tell about this?
Do not use when abdominal pain, nausea, or vomiting are present unless directed by a physician.
No one, that’s who. No one and never. The pharmacist stood up again, toting a clipboard back behind the pill shelves, and Alexis swung around.

Why were there so many brands, and could it possibly matter?
Early result. New! One step. Digital. Color sure tip. Over 99% accurate.
Deluged by the choices, she went with an established tack inherited from her mother: She picked the most expensive one, burying it beneath the shampoo and cottonballs and mascara and moisturizer and Sea Breeze as she strode from the aisle. If she was expecting any relief from having
done it,
from having grabbed the test without anyone seeing her or confronting her or asking her if there was anything she needed to talk about, none came. Instead, she felt
truly
radioactive now, as if her basket was glowing, pulsing, smoldering, leaving a trail of glo-green drips behind her. En route to the front of the store she added a jumbo bag of Doritos, jamming it into the basket as if to smother the radiation. She felt tears forming just below her eyeballs, felt her cheeks scalding, and was struck with the new fear that she might faint.

At the registers things only got worse. The schlubby, mustachioed cashier she’d spotted upon entering had been replaced by a blonde girl just a few years older than Alexis. The girl had stringy yellow hair and puffy eyes and was apparently new at the job because she was having trouble scanning a sack of Cat Chow that an elderly woman was trying to buy. Alexis focused on the cover of the
Cosmopolitan
perched beside the register:
Wicked Things Other Women Do in Bed (Our Naughtiest Sex Poll!),
read one coverline.
Are you a Bitch?
The old woman was digging through her purse for her CVS card while the cashier chewed gum.
The One Time to Tell Him “I Love You.”
Alexis noticed she was shaking—uncontrollably, visibly—and pinched her forearm, as hard as she could, to distract her physical self—so hard she could feel herself bruising.

And then the cashier said, “Next.” Afraid to look down at her basket, and determined to avoid eye contact, Alexis focused on the cigarettes arrayed behind the counter and counted to ten and then back down again while the cashier emptied the basket. She heard the crinkle of the Doritos, the swish of the cottonballs being scanned, flinching at every beep of the scanner. Would the beep be different, like the double-beep that sounded when you bought beer or cigarettes? “No,” she mumbled, when the cashier asked if she had a CVS card. As she was signing her name with the digital marker, for a credit purchase, she caught sight of the cashier loading the test into a white plastic bag, causing her signing hand to collapse and her last name to go dribbling below the signature line.

“Have a nice day,” the cashier said, and though Alexis tried avoiding her eyes, she failed. The cashier
knew.
Of course she knew. Alexis saw it in those puffy gray eyes, the downturned mouth, the way she’d stopped chewing her gum to stare at her, and with a sudden spasm of horror Alexis realized why: She was crying. She’d broken. Exposed, she looked straight at the cashier as if to plead for mercy or guidance or understanding or maybe shock or horror or disgust, aware of how wet her cheeks had gotten and what a sorry, mangled sight she must be, but the cashier just resumed her gum-chewing and said, “Next.”

Alexis grabbed the two bags and fled: through the twin sets of automatic doors, and out onto the white-bright sidewalk beside a red-topped trash can. A sob came up, wrenching her body the way vomiting does, and she grasped the trash can to steady herself.
This is not happening to me,
she said to herself. Gleams of sunlight bounced off the cars in the parking lot.
This is not happening to me,
she told herself again. And then, as if to prove it, she pushed one of the bags into the trash can, and feeling a strange and welcome release, pushed the other one in too. Yet again she said to herself,
This is not happening to me,
and took two steps backwards, wiping her cheeks with her forearm, feeling her balance returning as she put several yards of concrete between the trash can and herself, as if she’d somehow purged herself of this toxin, and was free,
free.
More coolly this time, she repeated it to herself,
This is not happening to me,
and with one last glance at the trash can turned toward her car.

T
HE NURSES WERE ALWAYS
telling Dr. Elwin Cross Sr. that he should lie down. That all this shuffling and reshuffling of papers he did, all this frantic hopping from one book to another and constant realigning of pencils and pens and notebooks and notecards, did nothing but frustrate him—“stress” him, they said—to the brink of combustion. “Why don’t you take a break?” they’d say, in that artificially chipper tone endemic to kindergarten teachers and restaurant hostesses, sometimes adding, “Nothing like a good long nap on a (rainy, sunny, winter, summer) afternoon . . .” When he’d resist this suggestion, as he always did, they’d point to his scarred and allegedly frail heart, sighing and frowning in what seemed to Dr. Cross the way a friend might note the wife and children of a man embarking upon an affair or some other reckless action—as though his sole duty in these swift and narrowing years was to coddle this one organ, to pledge above all else his custodial fealty to his over-monitored reptilian core.

This was, of course, a bunch of baloney. Dr. Cross didn’t like lying down, never had. Sleep just left your thoughts unsupervised, a terrible danger. He did, however, like bologna, which reminded him—well, it reminded him of something, but something that couldn’t possibly matter at the moment, because here he was, at his desk that was really a table in his room that was really a cell in this “assisted living facility” that was really a hospital in this hospital that was really a hospice, on page 235 of the book he was writing, the book he was too modest to call his “masterwork” aloud to anyone but his eldest son and maybe his wife (though she’d stopped listening to his shoptalk years ago, nowadays given to murmuring
uh-hmmmm, uh-hmmmm
from behind the veil of her
Time
magazine). He was midway through a chapter on the destruction of Melos by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, more precisely about whether or not the terrible massacre as described by Thucydides was in fact an instance of genocide as Chalk and Jonassohn had semi-convincingly argued five or was it twenty years ago, and, at present, he was sifting through the books on his desk in search of a note he remembered scratching in a margin. It was a penciled note—this detail he remembered—and would, if he could find it, lead him sideways to a quotation whose source and subject he couldn’t quite recall at this moment. Yet he could, with photographic clarity, remember the note itself, scrawled three-quarters of the way down a densely printed page with tight acid-brown margins, a curlicue of graphite scrawl that read . . .
baloney.
Except: no. He scowled. Not
baloney.
Where had that come from? He would never have written
baloney
in the margins of anything.
Dubious,
maybe.
Questionable. Arguable. Unlikely.
At worst,
pshaw!
And in any case—now he was really frowning, scratching at the side of his nose—there’d be no point in searching for a quotation he’d deemed
baloney
since baloney wasn’t quotable except in instances of scholarly aggression, something he’d outgrown decades ago.

He set the book down and craned his head forward to meet his hands, rubbing his temples and thereby dislodging his reading glasses so that one side fell dangling to his lips like collapsed scaffolding. Catching a reflected glimpse of himself in the window glass, a Jerry Lewis skit gone awry, he cursed, feeling faint twinges in his chest that if revealed would be cause for stethoscopes, diodes, flurries of
tsk-tsk
ing from the nurses, a compulsory prescription for horizontal torpor. Readjusting his glasses, he straightened his back into his chair and emitted the same classroom-volume
ahem
with which he’d shamed generations of whispery undergraduates. The
ahem
rang hollow, however: a bum tuning note, a failed engine crank. It occurred to him that he’d lost the ability to shame even himself. Suppressing another attempt, he thought: I can’t go on like this. He needed to focus, he thought—pay heed, “show a little ginger” as his father used to say. He had too much work left to do.

In the same brand of leather-bound legal notebooks he’d used to write his four previous books (notebooks he continued to order by mail from a legal-supply wholesaler in Newark, Mr. Teague was the wholesaler’s name, Dr. Cross could rattle off the address—115 Norfolk Street—like an old song lyric), page 235 of the new book lay open before him. The page was blank aside from the handwritten “235” in the bottom right corner and at the top left corner three words: “prosperity or ruin.” With a muddled squint he examined the words, struggling but failing to place them in context, then with a lick of his index finger he peeled back page 235 to see from page 234 what could have led to this grave-sounding polarity of prosperity or ruin. “Ah,” he said aloud, with a mixture of relief and self-abasement, as when a search for misplaced keys ends in their most obvious resting place. The words were part of a quotation from Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, when the Athenians were threatening the unsubmissive Melians with complete annihilation: “You have not more than one country, and upon this one deliberation depends its”—depends its what?, he wondered, turning back to page 235—oh: “prosperity or ruin.” He picked up a pencil and hovered it over the page until gravity, rather than inspiration or just plain yeoman will, drew its point to the page. The pencil stayed motionless as he returned his eyes to the window, his attention drawn beyond his sour reflection to the sidewalk one story down where a woman in a short pleated skirt with a phone pressed to her ear drifted past, her right arm swinging in fierce gesticulation, her head bobbing as she paused beside a mailbox to drive home some essential and boilsome point—telling a tale of amazement he would never chance to hear. It wasn’t this last realization, however, that provoked the sudden suck of melancholy he felt: a quick and desolate sense of a stopper being pulled so that his daily supply of lightness and energy—already meager—went circling a drain. It was the skirt, and the yellow light reflected on the sheen of her bare legs. He hadn’t known, until that moment, that it was summer. No one had told him. All they ever told him was to lie down.

Summer! That meant Alice was in the backyard garden in Montclair. There was long-distance comfort in this image, a mental railing for him to grasp. He wondered how high the tomatoes were, and if the hornworms had assaulted them yet, and if so whether David had dropped one down Jane’s shirt and whether Alice had punished him for it, which she rarely if ever did because David, as she was so incautiously prone to stating publicly, was her favorite child. Dr. Cross had never been fond of Alice’s garden—he’d never understood her desire for all that grimy fuss, for the pruning and staking and kneeling and mulch-schlepping, or the way Alice would return from an afternoon’s digging and weeding with the sated pink-chested glow of a woman fresh from a tryst with her Mediterranean lover—but now, in the ammonia-scented dimness of his room, he was overcome with the uncharacteristic desire to deliver her a glass of lemonade, to see her rise smiling and startled from the soil to accept it, smearing her forehead as she wiped the sweat from it with her arm, him leaning on the opposite side of the picket garden fence, the two of them talking of—of what? Of the children, of neighborhood or campus gossip, or of beautiful sunlit nothingness—the nothingness that comes after two people have co-existed for so long that nothing new can ever be spoken, nothing save goodbye.