Bedside matters, p.11
Bedside Matters, page 11
“Take it, Gavin. Take the Bentley.”
“What?” His boyish self is suddenly stern.
“Take the car with you. What’s the point otherwise? Irma will get you the keys, whatever paperwork. I’m sure it’s all up-to-date.”
Trudy rests her sterling silver fork on the English bone china plate, other extravagances from yesteryear sitting idle. For the first time, she loses her composure and smiles wide-eyed as an adolescent.
“Trudy can drive your car back to Boston, you take the Bentley, Gavin. Keep it in a good garage while you’re traveling. I’ll give you a check to make sure you can cover that. It’s in impeccable condition. One of the gardeners tinkers with it and takes it for a spin every week. I don’t know if you should race it on the interstate, but you can have some fun in the country. Whatever, folks. Just understand I’m downsizing. About time.”
“Jesus, Dad—” And he’s speechless.
“Can’t sell it, though. Still in my name.”
They take off, elated. Walter is plunged into depression. Why did I do that…desperate to make things all right and rosy for my son…but that was all about me, he continues, not him, let alone abruptly shifting gears into sugar daddy will do any of us a damn bit of good.
•
There’s the family doctor and the blood doctor and the heart doctor and two neurologists plus the consulting one from the Mayo Clinic whose latest report conflicted with the teams at Cornell-Weill and Sloan Kettering. The more complicated it becomes, the less Walter is able to comprehend. Or to give a hoot. Long as Irma can sort it out, along with the daily flow of visiting nurses, which vein to draw from next, which pill to pop and when. Sensible, rock-solid Irma runs the show, him the dish du jour on display. As long as he gets rolled outdoors on nice days and stretches his lungs. It can seem almost normal, forgetting he’s strapped in place like in an electric chair, instead casually counting the varieties of birds in his yard. Cedar waxwing one moment, a rose-breasted grosbeak the next. And, on special occasions when he’s least expecting it, a brilliant cardinal followed by his muted female will sail through the scene. In that instant, Walter has won the lottery and forgotten all else.
•
Now when is that Tressie woman from the nail salon returning? He hasn’t forgotten the name, no sirree.
Who is the luckiest in this orchestra?
The reed.
Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.
•
“Paula, however did you find this rig?” Irma is helping Paula buckle him into the latest contraption of her doing, well beyond the simplicity of his wheelchair, more to Walter a Rube Goldberg machine.
“Dad, you are not the first invalid—”
“—or the terminally ill?”
“—to have some time for fresh air. And fun!”
Irma looks skeptical but would never contradict Walter’s daughter, Paula having made elaborate arrangements for the delivery of the buggy from a horse farm near Philadelphia that raises trotters and pacers. One of Walter’s handymen fashioned the connection to a mountain bike, which Paula also specialty ordered. This is its trial run, just around the driveways. Irma single-handedly as always lifts Walter into place. She has approved of the extra belts and harness to surpass such restraints on surely the wildest of rollercoasters.
Paula is sporting racing gear, those black skin-tight shorty leggings, sleek helmet, plus ferocious-looking black sneakers streaked with phosphorescent orange lines, like the gums of a snarling leopard. Who is he to have doubts of his safety, manhandled by the likes of his Amazonian watchdogs?
Off they go, probably at a snail’s pace but to Walter’s frail face he is being whiplashed as if this chariot was indeed on a racetrack. He can feel tears streaming down his cheeks, not from joy but from his stinging eyes. Irma forgot sunglasses. So she’s not perfect. Nor would be this outing to his team of doctors. The battery-operated warming vest he now wears indoors pushes him to the edge of overheating. Who knows what’s being jostled and yanked deep inside that’s been quarantined to bed rest? Who cares? He shuts his weeping eyes. He prays she takes another spin, opposite direction, please let this last. She does so. She knows her dad. Afterward, ensconced back in the hospital bed that’s built like his old Rolls, Walter exclaims, “The bumps were best of all!”
“Dad, I cannot thank you enough for building the new unit outright. We agreed. I only asked if you would float the loan.” Paula undoes the rubber band of her ponytail, shakes her head sideways, stands instead of sits. She is grasping the rail at the base of his bed, leaning into it as would a stretching athlete, although to him she looms like the coach after the loss, assuming the posture for the tongue-lashing about to commence. He crosses arms across his chest, best he can do by way of defense.
“From the bottom of my heart I appreciate your willingness to extend so far beyond the lifetime taxable exemption it looks like you’ve already met. That’s still up in the air. If it helps, I’ve talked with Charles and Horace about a property transfer from one of your trusts to another, to raise the valuation to an amount more likely when you pass on, so there’s hardly any capital gains. This’ll compensate for the taxable gift to me now.”
He gets the idea perfectly well but is more attentive to the tightening grip of her hands on the rail. She continues with legal particulars and finally lets go of the bed, standing erect as if she’s presiding at her board meeting, now with her arms folded crossways as are his.
“Who is Adam Crosby?” she asserts, not asks.
So that’s it. “You would have known him as Adam Michelson. Will’s son. Before Will lost custody of his boys and they changed their names to their mother’s. Eli, his older brother, was probably eager to disassociate himself from his father. Adam was likely dumb to it all.”
“Yes, dumb Adam! The derelict. How could you do this and without letting me know? My accountant threw up a red flag in an instant.”
“It’s only two hundred thousand, Paula. Pocket change for us.”
“What the hell for?”
Walter attempts to slide backward into the cubbyhole of composure he’s been nestled within for ages. At this he fails. “Adam, like you, is probably close to fifty. He goes to AA.”
“So what? How would you even know?”
“I’ve—I’ve made sort of friends with his boy. Alexander. He’s an outstanding young artist.”
“Christ, Dad.” She throws herself into the armchair but does not lean back. “Sort of friends.”
“Paula, we are sitting here largely because I got to keep it all.”
“Oh, my God. They’re trying to blackmail you, take advantage—” She runs out of steam, presses her temples.
“Adam is back on his feet, even more so than your brother, I should add. He’s returned to his trucking business. And the guys he works for are holding all the strings and limiting him. He wants to go off on his own.”
“Dad. We never got to sit here with your ever being a sucker. Every cent you know damn well you were entitled to.”
“And you, my wonder woman? You didn’t get a head start? It’s still going to be all yours. And some for Gavin, of course. You’re the one who needs it. You’re swelling the wealth. Employing hundreds. Creating capital. So, Adam, he just needs this helping hand.”
He has shut her up but can tell the wheels are spinning fiercely. She holds all the cards regarding her father at her disposal, including power of attorney. He knows she knows this gift to Adam is just a blip. He also knows for her there is a crack in the foundation, and she will stop at nothing to patch it.
“Speaking of Gavin,” says Walter, “he’s looking lean and trim like he would between his—incarcerations, rehab camps, I forget what they were called.”
“There were too many to keep track of,” she says, tired and slumped now but still teetering on the edge of vexation. Suddenly Paula looks up, startled as a thief caught in a flashlight. “Don’t tell me you’re going to set him up with another hair-brained scheme, like your underwriting him as a beer distributor. The women’s essential oil franchise, worse. Just another way to get laid.”
“Paula.”
“I’m not paid to be polite. And it’s got me way beyond my need for your approval. All of which you do in fact approve of.” With her hair down and softening a beautiful face, she is so much like her mother—natural beauty dismissing the need for makeup but masking the dead serious woman on board.
He heaves a sigh. “How are your kids?”
“You want the problems or the platitudes? We’re normal. Just like you and Mom and Gavin and me.”
“Skip the kids. Are you okay?”
She smiles, finally. “How the hell would I know? Barely have the time to brush my teeth. Sound familiar, Dad?”
He watches her collecting herself, shaking out her leonine limbs, checking her watch, readying her withdrawal.
“Well, I do have the time now, Paula. Not worrying, just thinking. And that includes not just about yourself but your brother. And, believe it or not, your mother, too.”
She kisses him as if she means it, as if she approves of the spunk with which he had put her down. And then he thinks: that can only fire her to be ever more vigilant about, to her, his reckless spending.
Today, a mere skirmish. The battle lines have been drawn.
•
“Quite a week, Walter,” says Irma, idling bedside with an empty soup bowl. “Both your children in and out. The visits appear to have invigorated you.”
“Invigorate? They stir the beans, that’s for sure. Odd that Paula was more the handful this time.”
Irma cocks a hip, in no rush to leave. “I know you’re listening to them, taking them in, shifting yourself aside.”
“Do I have a choice at this point?”
“Of course, you do. Acknowledging where they’re at, with you of no concern. There was a line in one of the new books quoting the Dalai Lama. ‘My religion is kindness.’ Both Paula and Gavin after their visits said as much to me—Dad is being so nice.”
Little do they know. What even do I know of what I’m about?
Chapter 11
When I hold out silver coins,
take them,
and give me a cup of liquid full of gold light.
No, Walter. These days I just give talks around the country, Polly said ages ago best he can recall.
You’re a motivational speaker! Nothing’s changed.
I sit on panels where women from around the region gather to discuss ways to bolster their fledgling or underfunded chapters of Planned Parenthood.
You’ve never let that one go, Polly, and good for you.
Well, it’s more than how to raise money, it’s PR. Imagine it has to keep being resold, this most basic of rights. Getting stories out about an abused mother right in their midst, on her own with five kids and trying to make ends meet, desperate to avoid another pregnancy. That kind of thing.
He shakes his head, still in awe of this woman who used to be his wife. And Jack’s okay with you hiking all over?
After thirty years he says he loves the chance for frozen dinners. A break from my kale salads and the like! He has his cigars, and can indulge at the club with his golf cronies. He’s so easy. Watches Gomer Pyle reruns, can you stand it?
I do, too! He lets that sink in. This woman with two men cut from the same cloth. He says: I admit I was not easy, Polly. Nor were you. We’d both be squirming at the symphony.
Oh, Walt, you always got headaches or an upset tummy the minute we began a vacation. Simply could not relax, those years.
You should see me now, he thinks presently, flat on his back. I guess you’ve been here a few times to visit, I’ve lost touch.
Paula will send him an email with a video attachment featuring a clip of Polly on some local TV interview, commenting upon the fight to block a state initiative banning abortion outright. Polly always appears so rational, articulate, never angry. Schoolmarmish in her matronly years, a worldly senior whose wisdom you don’t question. But isn’t that the role I happily helped her assume at a third our age now? You go your way, Polly, and I’ll go mine. What about the personhood of a zygote thing down south? it strikes Walter. Was that Polly or more recent? It’s all a mash-up the more he attempts to recollect. If I’m going to reminisce about the old girl, why not the few but marvelous times smooching when we each got carried away? Ray Charles in his raspy voice tripping out “Georgia On My Mind,” or was that farther back in high school with another girl, him too nervous to notice her name or the particulars? Whatever he remembers specifically with Polly, it was something slithery—Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole?—as he and she stroked and groped but ever so slowly, in sync to the mellow, sexy music. Johnny Mathis. Swoon. The two of them definitely on the same page for that business.
Suddenly Polly is saying: We were both absent parents for Gavin. It wasn’t just you, Walt, glued to your desk downtown. I wasn’t traveling, but soon after Gavin in grammar school, for me it was one project after another. I sure as heck didn’t correctly read the early signals for his unwinding.
Mostly luck of the draw, Walter offers. A faulty gene.
But at the time, somehow between the lines, and all the talk otherwise, Polly left open the possible interpretation that pinned much of the blame on the man of the house.
All of this is in the dustbin. Leave it be. Backward glances can become a pain in the neck.
Except what else is there, with no future?
•
The latest monthly bloodwork indicates no change. His condition is stable. Perhaps the periodic stints outdoors stimulate his appetite. The doctor seems pleased. Irma his overseer stands proud. Walter is neither disappointed by the news nor hopeful. He remains wafting in otherworldly realms, landing on no one planet in particular. His medical situation is what it is, and beyond anything he can do. As such, he is determined not to dwell on it. On some days, he can even lapse into a state of utter freedom. Dare he call it bliss? It’s like being blinded momentarily by a fiery scarlet sunset, seizing one’s attention to the point of forgetting to breathe. Whoever he is, for those few seconds, ceases to exist.
•
“Now we do the feet!” chirps Tressie from the nail salon for Round Two. She prances about the bed as if she’s arrived at a disco, ready to cut loose.
“Afraid not a lot of feeling down there,” says Walter.
She presses a foot firmly between her two hands. “You feel that?”
“Sure. I’ve been thinking of the massage you did that first session on my hands. That was heavenly.”
“Don’t rush me! Massage later. First let’s look at these nails.” She’s not in a uniform, her scant bid for looking professional a simple white shirt compromised by the white skirt barely below her bottom, more like the outfit of a tennis pro. The plain blouse makes all the more vibrant a big red hibiscus, artificial he assumes, pinned behind one ear. But Walter, who admittedly has not seen it all, is blown away by the jungle flower pattern of her tights, an outlandish, irreverent Easter parade of their own.
Tressie works like a surgeon on each of his toes, snipping with precision while her delicate fingers not employed are aiming every which way so as not to interfere. One of his big toes is cocked askew at an alarming angle about which Walter is squeamish. She looks up. “I’ve seen bunions much worse. Be glad there’s no fungus, your feet are fine.”
He closes his eyes, the better not to be distracted by her dazzle, by her twitching volumes of frizzy hair, like the whole of her, as if she’s inescapably programmed with dance steps, a wind-up doll that never runs down.
He slips into a semi-dream. Polly is hovering over him during their sex early on, taking the lead, giving him permission to let go. That fades and is replaced by remembering that Tressie is a single mother with a son. Or is that Gavin’s woman Jody, Tonya, something with a T? Doesn’t she too have a son, or am I mixing them up?
“Before I file, I’m going to soak your feet.”
“Really?”
“Irma said you can sit up. I’ll just swivel you around so you can be on the edge of the bed.” And she proceeds to set up a small stepladder and the tub of warm water into which she adds salts.
He is anxious sitting upright unaided. Where’s Irma? But he does not want her to meddle! This is Tressie’s show. Soon he’s engulfed with a pleasure never known. He sighs, slumped, ignoring his precarious pose.
“You like that, Mr. Walt?”
“Oh, yes,” he murmurs. “Like once in the Caribbean. But no kids, no wife, no sharks.”
“Shush,” she croons and softly hums another Latin song.
Eventually, reclined once again, Tressie gently pushes back the tabs of flesh that have encroached over the nails. It hurts but how he is savoring all these sensations! Wiping him dry with a warm towel—where did that come from?—she begins with the filing, clipping now and then a nail that doesn’t meet her standard for perfection. She is all business, but every time he catches a glimpse of those technicolor tights, he thinks of the cartoons before the main film at the kids’ matinee: perfectly silly, purely for fun.
“Now for the foot massage. Lie back down. Close your eyes. Stop staring!” By way of halting conversation, she hums a tune he is straining to identify. “The Girl from Ipanema.” Surely not. Way before her time.
He does as he is told. He sinks into the firm but tender pressure, then release, followed by smooth strokes lapping at him like the undulating water mattress he and Polly once tried to revive their aching backs if not their marriage. Soon he is lulled into submission. The whole of the cosmos is condensed into a single, lowly toe. Thank goodness there are ten of them.
