The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

IT WAS A Sunday afternoon in winter and Alex and his girlfriend Debbie were lolling around on her futon, naked, with beers open, talking about Debbie’s mother, who was threatening to visit. Debbie’s mother lived in grand style down in Louisville, Kentucky.

  “My mother says I’m a tourist in my own life,” said Debbie and laughed. She laughed frequently, often bitterly, but her laugh was tentative, as if she expected to be interrupted. “She says I’m leaning back when I should be leaning forward. She says I act like I’m constantly exhaling cigarette smoke through my nose.”

  “And you don’t even smoke,” he said.

  “I know!” she said. “I told you about the time she hid my college applications. She didn’t even want me to get into Brown.”

  “Yes,” he replied curtly. “You told me.” He was sick of hearing about Brown. He knew a number of people who had gone there. There was something about Brown University that imbued their graduates with a Tourette’s-like compulsion to drop their alma mater’s name with absurd frequency. Debbie’s mouth was set in a pout. She was an ironic pouter. But eventually the irony wore off the pout, like lipstick, and what remained was self-pity.

  “The college application injustice has been combed over already,” he said. “With a fine-tooth comb. And besides, you got in.”

  At which point, in an act of escapist desperation, Alex went to the phone and dialed his answering machine. The machine he was calling was located in his mother’s house, in his room, on the bottom shelf of a night table next to his bed; it was an old clunker of a machine that clattered loudly when it rewound and played back, a sound that was audible everywhere in the apartment, so these check-ins with his machine were, on some level, the psychic equivalent of poking his head into his own home and saying hello to his mom, without actually having to say hello. He spent most nights at Debbie’s.

  “Yo, cuz,” the message began. The voice was so low that the reverb it created was almost too much for the telephone to convey. “You’ll never believe who this is. I’m calling about Aunti B. Serious shit is going down. She had a bad fall. I just got a call from the hospital. I can’t get up there until the weekend, so you got to check it out. She’s at Columbia Presbyterian right now. I’ve been on the horn all afternoon talking to doctors. They’re saying some bad shit, man. She got knocked over by the wind. Right in front of the building. A gust of wind just knocked her down, man. It’s fucked. Call me.”

  He called Columbia Presbyterian. Yes, his aunt was there. No, it was past visiting hours, there was nothing he could do. He called Karl’s number. He got a machine, on which Karl’s recorded voice sounded relatively sane. It struck him as intensely strange that he should have a cousin with whom he had not spoken in so many years.

  “Karl, it’s Alex,” he began. “I’m going in the morning.” Then he added, tentatively, unsure if it was a lie, “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  ALEX WAS WEIRDLY in the mood for a hospital scene. His postgraduate existence, in which he worked as a personal assistant for a movie producer for whom he ran complex errands to the dry cleaners and walked the dog and was chastised for eating too many of the chewable vitamin C’s that sat on the producer’s desk, was becoming a little too small, and except for drinking, the comfort of Debbie’s loft, and his sleep-overish obsession with her family, there was nothing to soften the edge, no graduation to look forward to or dread, no mandatory transition, no imminent waterfall for which to brace.

  A hospital scene is unreal real life. All niggling concerns about love and ambition are put on hold. The hospital visitor proceeds with the single-minded concentration of someone hacking through the jungle’s underbrush where they glimpse, through the dense foliage of their grief, their own soul, and find it worthy.

  THE HOSPITAL SMELLED like a hospital—like death and exposed feet. He wound his way through the fluorescent halls and came to her room. The first thing he saw was a very large black woman groaning and asleep. On the far side of the room lay his aunt. Her face was badly bruised and gaunt, her eyes were wide, panic-stricken, and staring up at the ceiling as though she were looking at the sky and seeing some terrible midair collision between two planes. Her lips were moving slightly, and when he came closer he heard she was speaking German. When he arrived next to her bed he noted, with horror, that her wrists were tied down to the bed.

  The shape of her mouth and her brow held something that reminded him strongly of his father, or of pictures of his father. In the absence of the man himself, the pictures and the man became confused, as when you are not sure you remember something that happened to you when you were very young, or if you simply remember being told about it.

  He found the doctor, a youngish man with wispy remnants of blond hair on his head, wire-rimmed glasses, and a long complicated nose. They sat down in a conference room down the hall. Alex immediately wondered how many people had sat in this chair and heard the news that their loved one was going to die.

  “So tell me what your relationship is to Ms. Fader,” said the doctor.

  “I’m the nephew. She has another nephew. And a brother who lives abroad.”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  “And that brother is your father?”

  “No. My father was her other brother.”

  “And where is he?”

  “Just out of curiosity, why are you asking?” said Alex.

  “I want to know the situation,” he said. He clasped his hands. “I need to know who I’m talking to.”

  “You’re talking to one of the two people in the country she is related to. Her other nephew lives in Philadelphia.”

  “I see.”

  “What’s up with my aunt?”

  This, he thought, was just what he needed: to stride through halls where his small petty concerns were reduced to the appropriate size. To relinquish all the little plans, the schedules, the whole self-interested enterprise of himself, so as to do something for someone else. For a flash he wondered if being a parent was a little like this, a thousand selfless gestures, each its own reward. The prospect of death was so clarifying. His aunt had been a pain in the ass whom he visited maybe once or twice a year for his whole life in spite of the fact that she lived about a fifteen-minute walk away from him, yet now she was in trouble and he was going to be there for her. Or at least visit her in the hospital.

  The doctor rubbed his hands together.

  “Was your aunt ever in a concentration camp?” he asked.

  “No,” said Alex, surprised. “They all got out. Or the immediate family….” He had a nauseating pang of doubt, about everything.

  “I see. Because she is very hostile, very suspicious, she is mostly speaking German, and one of the nurses here who speaks German, says it isn’t making much sense.”

  Alex briefly pondered the peculiar idea that by virtue of speaking German and being a pain in the ass his aunt was a concentration camp candidate. If the question was being asked, there must be some grounds for it. Perhaps all over New York there were survivors who in the tumultuous flow of life had been dignified and controlled, who had kept their death-camp experiences a deep subtext, who had lived in the present and made money and been parents and grandparents, but now with their last breaths were unleashing torrents of rage and tormenting doctors like this one.

  “Generally speaking,” said Alex, “she is a somewhat difficult person. But I don’t think that means she has been in a concentration camp.”

  “But the nurse says that she keeps talking about someone and what they did to him. Do you know who she might be talking about?

  “No,” said Alex. “I don’t.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor. He looked pensive for a moment. Alex had the weird thought that maybe the doctor’s wife was having an affair. The doctor had a distanced, abstract look in his eyes, wishful and anxious, as if he was living through some terrible episode over which had no power. Alex stared into his face for further evidence of his theory, but the doctor turned his gaze back to
wards Alex and his face softened into an expression people use when they have importantly bad news to deliver.

  “Your aunt has Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “We’re going to strongly recommend that she be put into a home.”

  Alex took this in for a moment.

  “Is that bad?” he said. “I mean, how bad is that?”

  “In your aunt’s case, the disease has progressed a fair amount. I would say it’s quite bad.”

  “Jesus,” said Alex. He stared at the floor for a moment and then looked sharply at the doctor. “Is Alzheimer’s disease hereditary?”

  He immediately hated himself for the question.

  THE TWO COUSINS had staged their reunion in a dim hallway at Columbia Presbyterian where family members sat on benches, waited, worried, collected themselves, or, in the case of Alex and Karl, became reacquainted with each other.

  Alex filled Karl in on the basic outline of his life: his awful job assisting the producer, the fact that he still lived at home, his vague thoughts about film school. He told Karl he played drums in a band. Karl looked at him somberly and said, “I knew you had the spirit in you, bro. I knew it.” His voice boomed through the cavernous hallway. Alex often wondered if perhaps playing drums in a band—which he loved doing, in part because its futility (in any practical terms) made it seem pure—was something he ought to reconsider. Karl’s endorsement added considerable fuel to that fire.

  Karl, for his part, was living above a beauty salon in North Philadelphia; he had been in some trouble with drugs, and he had come within one lucky break of really making it big with the Karl Fader Band. But the band had disbanded. He was on a strict regimen of AA and NA meetings and was taking courses towards a college degree. He worked at a firm that specialized in medical headhunting, a temp job, he explained, but it was better that way, “because I like the flexibility.”

  Karl scared him a little bit. There was something extremely volatile and untrustworthy about him. And yet Alex had to recognize a strange glowing emotion that radiated out from Karl, to which he could only offer a tentative friendliness.

  “I have something to tell you, bro,” Karl had said. “About a year ago I walked into Aunti B’s place, and there she is with her mail everywhere. I mean stacks of it, piles of it, unopened bills, and she’s just wandering around in her apartment, totally lost. I got power of attorney, and started paying her bills.”

  “What exactly does power of attorney mean?” said Alex.

  “It means I can sign her checks,” said Karl.

  Alex was immediately suspicious. But why? His cousin Karl was looking after their Aunti B. No one else was going to take care of her. He tried to feel generosity towards Karl. But something held him back.

  “I can see you’re suspicious, which is cool,” said Karl, who seemed to be really enjoying the general sense of drama. It made Alex feel ill. But at the same time he had to admit he was slightly enjoying it too.

  “There’s a will,” Karl said.

  “And what does it say?” said Alex.

  “Sixty-forty, me and you.”

  “There can’t possibly be any money to divide.”

  “Oh, but there is,” said Karl with a big smile. “There is.”

  THEY WENT UPSTAIRS and took Aunti B home. She was delighted to see them both, and even seemed her old self as she left, saying goodbye to the doctor and then, as she limped down the hall, muttering, “The food here is terrible! Awful!”

  Instead of arranging for a nursing home, Esmeralda, the housekeeper, was now drafted to be a full-time nurse. For her this meant nearly a thousand dollars a week. For Alex and Karl, it meant some time.

  When they got home, Esmeralda cooked them all lunch. Karl made some jocular remarks to her about how good the food was, and Esmeralda smiled rather bashfully. She had a luscious mane of brown wavy hair that came down below her shoulders, and a full figure, and when she smiled a gold tooth flashed at the front of her mouth. Alex was meeting her for the first time, and her bashfulness, and the gold tooth, and her figure, caught his eye.

  When the plate was set before her, Aunti B looked at it as though it were a plate of dog food.

  “It’s a tuna fish sandwich, Aunti B,” said Karl. “It’s not going to bite you. It’s good! Look.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “Mmmmm.”

  “Tuna fish,” she muttered. “Vas is dat?”

  “Eat it, Aunti B,” said Karl. There was a certain menace in his voice. She ate it.

  “Terrible!” she said. Esmeralda’s face hardened a little. For a moment she had been in the spirit of this family gathering, but now she was just marking time, doing a job. Alex felt her presence with a strange acuteness. He liked it.

  “We have to talk about her money,” Karl said later that afternoon, in a coffee shop where they had convened, leaving Esmeralda to try and shepherd Aunti B to bed.

  “Why?” said Alex. “She can’t possibly have any money. She has a pension from her job, and when she dies that will be gone.”

  “As it turns out…” said Karl, and onto the Formica tabletop he dumped a gaggle of bankbooks.

  Alex stared at the bankbooks and marveled how an element of the surreal, of insanity, seemed to creep into everything Karl touched. Bankbooks were strange, pre-electronic, antiquated things. And so many bankbooks?

  “The situation we’re in is this,” said Karl. “It’s a situation that millions of people like you and me are in all across America. It’s fucked.”

  Alex was highly attuned to a special dip in Karl’s voice. He was being sold on something.

  “She has quite a bit of money,” said Karl. “At least compared to what you would expect.”

  “Which is a little bit more than nothing,” said Alex.

  “A couple hundred thou. Compared to what it costs to be in a nursing home, it is nothing. One or two years in a nursing home, and her life savings are down the drain. You have to go broke before the government helps, and of course they do an audit to make sure you don’t just transfer all your money to your kids and then say, ‘Hey. I’m broke!’ But I have a plan. It’s simple. We keep a detailed account in a logbook of all the time we spend there at her place, all the time we spend doing things for her, and we pay ourselves.”

  “How much time do you expect to be spending working on Aunti B–related things?” said Alex. “How much money could that possibly add up to?”

  Karl announced what he thought was a fair hourly rate.

  “Lawyers get paid that much per hour,” said Alex. “Doctors. We’re her nephews, not her psychiatrists. It’s not a paid position.”

  “Well, bro, I’m glad you put it that way, because in a way we’re both her psychiatrists and her lawyers. That is exactly it. I couldn’t have put it better myself. And we deserve it. Do you think she saved and scrimped all those years so she could just turn it all over to a nursing home? No way, man! I already looked into it. We’ll need somewhere between fifty and a hundred grand to move her into a good home. Esmeralda is another chunk of change. And the rest we split. And anyway, she paid her taxes. It’s not like we’re ripping anyone off.”

  “This sounds like an absurd scam. What happens when we’ve spent all her money and the government says, ‘Sorry, guys, you don’t get paid for being nice to your aunt’? And then we’ve got this crazy person on our hands, and she has to go to some terrible place.”

  “You could have the apartment,” said Karl matter-of-factly. “Rent-controlled. You never know how long it would take before they noticed she’s not living there. Here’s the deal. You write Aunti B a check every month, I deposit it in her account, then I write the realty company a check with her personal checks, which is what I’ve been doing for over a year now. You haven’t had a place of your own, right? This’ll be your first place. You’ll love living at Aunti B’s.”

  “I couldn’t possibly live in her house,” said Alex. “It’s her house! It would be like living with her.”

  “What do you say, cuz? Are you in on th
is? Or do you feel so fucking patriotic that you want all of Aunti B’s hard-earned money, which she fucking saved all her life to give to you and me, do you want it to go to some fucking nursing home?”

  “How do you know it’s for you and me?” said Alex.

  “I told you. There’s a will.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Sixty-forty,” Karl repeated. He slid four bankbooks to Alex, and kept six.

  “All I want is my share,” said Karl. “I’ll give you power of attorney also and you can go down to the East River Savings Bank on Ninety-sixth Street whenever you feel like it and pay yourself a couple of thousand. That place is like going to the track. There’s a hundred old people checking out interest rates and flipping their CDs. You get your share, I get mine. Other than that, we do everything the best for Aunti B. The best social workers, the best home I can get, the best everything. And what’s left goes to you, and to me.”

  AFTER THAT INITIAL encounter they saw each other only once every couple of months but spoke regularly on the phone. Karl did weekends with Aunti B. Alex popped in during the week.

  Karl’s relationship to Aunti B’s money annoyed Alex. Karl, even when he was perfectly sane and actually getting things done, seemed sloppy, deranged, expansive, delusional. He was able to imbue the most fundamental and simple transaction with the atmosphere of insanity. Alex couldn’t get past it. He lectured himself on Karl’s virtues and tried to drown out his reservations: Isn’t he taking care of Aunti B? Isn’t he shouldering the responsibility for her when no one else in the whole world is up to it? Including yourself!

  WINTER TURNED TO spring.

  Aunti B was changing in unexpected ways. There was something infantilizing about Alzheimer’s; it was opening her up and, in some odd way, making her a warmer, more pleasant person.

  One day Alex came over to find her standing in the middle of her orange rug, clutching a photograph of a young man. The man was earnest-looking, handsome, with wire-rimmed glasses and a touching number of pens shoved into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket.