It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (8 page)

The incalculable life gesture . . .
And yet here was death growing in his throat! He remembered a visit he and Sara had made to a relative of Sara’s in Minneapolis. They had walked down the Nicollet Mall to the river and come to a place called Cancer Survivor’s Park. The name, in stenciled metal letters over the gate, had shocked him. Its brazen literalness where some poetic euphemism might have been expected gave its summons to celebrate the afflicted an aggressive thrust that had made him want to do just the opposite: to recoil from the very thought of such ghoulish beings. And yet now his best hope was to become one of them!

“Spare a dollar, mister?”

A panhandler had intruded an empty coffee cup into his field of vision. Richard dropped some change into the cup. The man’s eyes went straight to the coins, counting them. He turned away without a word of thanks.

A familiar stung sensation flared in Richard, reminding him how much he had come to dislike the city. He had found it exhilarating in the days when he lived here, but now, increasingly, he felt himself at odds with it. Every time he came down it seemed harder, cruder, more mercantile, the people thronging its streets crazier and more grotesque. On his last visit he had seen a woman in stiletto heels leading a muzzled raccoon on a leash. He didn’t think of himself as censorious, let alone a prude, but the place seemed to bring forth some puritanical layer of his personality. A steady stream of disapproving observations would flow through him, unbidden. Even now he found himself grimly taking note of new depths of folly, new kinds of utterly unnecessary things—gadgets, clothes, jewelry, services, entertainments—publicized on every available surface in newly unpleasant ways, the ads caught up in their own logic of escalating tawdriness. One for a dating website outside a subway showed a near-naked couple grinning in post-coital bliss. Two intertwined hearts glowed above them, but it might just as well have been genitalia. The ideal state of affairs, things seemed to imply, was a continual orgy. If you weren’t desirable, then dye your hair, spend the day in a tanning salon, sign up at one of these gyms that flaunted their robotic, Lycra-clad members at passersby through vast street-level windows. Turn the inside of • your head into your own private rock stadium . . . The steady convergence of mainstream commerce with what had once been marginal or underground was peculiarly dismaying. In the past, when you grew sick of one of these worlds, you could shift, mentally, into the other, but now they had consolidated, and there was nowhere to escape. The whole world, as he had read somewhere, was an underworld. If you described New York to even a liberal-minded person of fifty years ago, he would tell you the apocalypse must have come . . .

But in the thick of these thoughts a sudden bewilderment seized him. Where did they come from? What was the basis, within him, for this indignation? On what rock of conviction was it founded? If you didn’t believe in God or the soul or the hereafter, then what was a human being if not merely living meat? And if that was so, then surely it was natural to want to be healthy, nubile, muscular, lusty . . . Better that than
tainted
meat, as he had become! It was he himself who was grotesque, surely, with this little death kernel growing in his throat.

The specialist’s offices were in a grandiose corner building. Granite steps led from the tree-lined street to a revolving door. Behind it was a dim lobby with a uniformed doorman, who sent Richard up to the seventh floor. The offices themselves were sleekly modern, furbished in brushed steel and blond wood. The young woman receptionist was dressed like a model, with a puff of pink chiffon at her throat. There were no files or papers of any kind on her desk. Occasionally she spoke into thin air, answering an invisible, inaudible telephone.

The specialist, a Dr. Jameson, was much younger than Richard had expected: mid-thirties, with thick fair hair and large freckles on his boyish face. Long ginger eyelashes gave him a sleepy, hedonistic look.

“Come on in, Mr., uh, Timmerman,” he said, glancing at some papers.

He sat Richard in a contraption like a dentist’s chair while he read through the referral papers, apparently for the first time. “Huh,” he said neutrally. With a light toss he dropped the papers onto the desk.

“Let’s take a look.”

He leaned in over Richard, probing with strong, well-manicured fingers into the soft tissue under Richard’s chin. He wore a watch that appeared to have neither numerals nor hands, and he smelled faintly of vanilla.

Another laconic “huh” was his only comment after the examination. He stepped back over to the desk and picked up the envelope that Richard had brought, taking out the CAT scan images. He examined them for a long, silent interval.

“This is upstate somewhere, this, uh, East Deerfield?”

“Yes.” Richard could hear the tremor in his own voice. Evidently he was about to be advised to move closer to some urban area with access to state-of-the-art treatment facilities. In which case it was all over.

“Why?” he asked.

“No reason. I just...”

The doctor yawned.

“Excuse me. Sorry. You have a stone in your saliva gland. A small calcium deposit. Sialolithiasis is the technical term. If it becomes uncomfortable, you can have it removed surgically, maybe broken up with ultrasound. Otherwise it’ll probably work its own way out. Either way it’s not a big deal.”

Richard felt as if he were levitating out of the chair.

“You mean, there’s no—there’s no lymphoma?”

“No.”

Only as he took the elevator back down did he pick up the note of faint scorn in the question about East Deerfield, the amused disdain of the cosmopolitan practitioner for his colleague out in the sticks. A smile rose on his lips. With it, clarified by the strong joy of the moment, came the memory of his obscure sense of having been too hastily dismissed by Dr. Taubman, as if the man had been afraid he was going to start visibly decaying right there in his office and scare away the other patients. He would have liked to strut into Taubman’s office, not so much to berate him for his mistake as to flaunt his freshly certified health in the man’s face . . .

It. was still sunny outside. He walked slowly toward the train station, conscious of how rare it was to be able to savor, so undis-tractedly, the pure pleasure of being alive. Everything he looked at, every face he passed, seemed a part of this pleasure, a fiery splendor suffusing even the most mundane things. A deliveryman bustled by, wheeling stacks of clear-topped containers in which the vivid colors of cold cuts and raw vegetables, each partitioned in their own segment, glow
^r
ed—it seemed to Richard—like the panels of a rose window in some ancient cathedral. In a parking lot behind a row of blossoming trees a shiny crimson car was being lifted effortlessly into the air by a hydraulic steel arm. Glorious! As he passed by, Richard realized he hadn’t thought of his quarrel with his sister for days; not since his visit to Dr. Taubman. How trivial that whole business seemed. How absurd to have let it upset him as much as it had. In his exhilarated state the solution appeared obvious: he must call Ellen right away, tell her she could stay in the house for as long as she wanted. In his heart of hearts he had always known this was the right thing to do; he simply hadn’t been able to summon, with any conviction, the feeling of largesse such a gesture would require. Now, however, he felt it in abundance. True, he had been counting on his share of the sale to put something substantial aside for his children’s college fund, perhaps also build a screened-in porch so that they could eat outside in summer. But so what? He had a life—in every sense!— whereas Ellen had nothing. If it meant so much to her to go on living in the family home, then let her. Let her! The decision further boosted his sense of euphoria. As he took out his phone, he seemed to glimpse some large, resplendent state of existence opening itself up to him.

He dialed her number.

“What?” came the familiar voice.

“Ellen, it’s me, Richard.”

“ L know. What do you want?”

“I just—” He broke off. Her hostile tone, though no different from the usual way she’d been talking to him since their quarrel began, presented an unexpected obstacle. It seemed necessary to bring her into his exuberant state of mind before he could reveal his momentous decision.

“I’m in New York. Our doctor thought I had lymphoma because of a lump under my chin, and I’ve spent the last week thinking I was going to die. But I’m not. I’ve just come out of a specialist’s office, and he says I’m fine. It was just a stone!”

He paused. Ellen said nothing.

“I thought I’d call you, you know . . He trailed off, unnerved by the silence at the other end.

“I see,” she said finally. “Well, I’m happy for you, Richard. I’m glad you’re not going to die. But now I’m afraid I have to go out. Since my car’s broken down again, Scott and I have to start walking to the post office so I can pay my bills before it closes. Otherwise I’m sure I’d have time to chat.”

The martyred tone was a specialty of hers. He tried not to let it provoke him.

“Listen. Ellen. I want to talk about the house.”

“Ah. I thought so.”

God, she was impossible! She knew him well enough to have an idea where he was trying to go with this. But was she going to be gracious about it? No! She was going to make it as unpleasant as possible. Already he could feel the old rankling annoyance mounting inside him. How easy it would be to succumb: lash out at her for making others pay the price for her hapless way of living, present her with some stark, inflexible ultimatum . . . But he resisted it. He was damned if he was going to let her stop him making his great gesture of magnanimity. He would do it for his own sake, if not hers.

“What I want to tell you,” he said, forcing out the words, “is that I’ve decided to let you stay on in the house for as long as you need to. That’s all.”

There was a long pause.

“Well, that’s awfully charitable of you, Richard, and I’m glad you won’t be trying to have me and Scott evicted from our home. But since I had no intention of leaving anyway, it doesn’t really change anything, does it? Now if it’s okay with you, I have to run.”

She hung up.

He moved on down Seventh Avenue, stunned. He told himself that he’d said what he wanted to say, and that was all that mattered; that however she took it, he’d acquitted himself with dignity and compassion. Furthermore, he’d brought an end to their tedious, unseemly quarrel, and now, finally, he would be able to turn his mind to loftier things again.

But all the earlier expansiveness had gone from him; in its place a drab, ashen sensation, as if the bitterness of his sister’s dismal existence had flowed into him through the phone.

And for a moment he felt as if he hadn’t yet had his appointment with Dr. Jameson after all; as if he were still waiting, frightened and uncertain, for his diagnosis.

The house was a square Victorian building with a white stuccoed facade and balustraded balconies at the windows. Twelve granite steps, sheltered by a glass-paned awning, led up to a massive front door with a brass lion’s head glaring from its center.

On Tuesday afternoons at five o’clock Martin Sefton would climb the steps to give the Knowles boys their weekly lessons on the classical guitar. An au pair would let him in. Passing through a hallway that smelled of floor polish and fresh flowers, he would carry his guitar up the four flights of stairs to the boys’ rooms at the top of the house. As he climbed, he could see out of the landing windows onto the back garden, and sometimes he would pause to look down at the sizable lawn surrounded by a mass of blossoms and foliage.

It was in a garden very like this that Martin had been inspired, at the age of twelve, to become a classical guitarist. The occasion had been a summer party in Highgate, where a man in a psychedelic shirt had been playing flamboyant pieces on his honey-colored instrument out on the grass, surrounded by beautiful, spellbound women. A distant, somewhat rueful memory of the event would echo through Martin as he gazed down at the Knowleses’ garden. Despite his having studied diligently at the Royal College, where he had been encouraged by his teachers to hope for great things, his career as a performer had not taken off. By the time he accepted that it wasn’t going to, his energies, as far as any large ambition was concerned, had been fully consumed. Besides, there was nothing else he wanted to do.

After he had given the boys their lessons, he would make his way back downstairs, where an envelope would be waiting for him on the bowlegged hall table, with a check inside, signed by Mrs. Knowles. Like her two sons, Mrs. Knowles was dark-haired and pale-skinned with bright blue eyes and the kind of delicately faceted English features that can arouse feelings of vague inferiority in those, like Martin, who do not possess them. She cultivated an extreme refinement of appearance that had made her seem momentarily older than her years when Martin met her on his first visit to the house. She had been arranging flowers in the vase on the hall table when he arrived and had continued doing so as she spoke to him, barely glancing in his direction after an initial, coolly appraising smile of welcome. Since then Martin had seen her only once, standing in a corridor speaking on a cordless phone, a secretive smile at her lips. She was wearing pink nail polish, pearl earrings, and a white silk T-shirt, under which her breasts showed like two thorns. Martin had nodded at her, but although she was looking directly at him, she gave no indication of seeing him.