Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  On one level I believe her, but, on another, the words sound rehearsed, meant for everyone, hardly the personalized language I want to hear for Zandor.

  All I can say is, “Thank you. We will put our trust in you.” After I say it, I feel awkward, as if I have been speaking for Zan and Gwen. I realize, then, that Zan has said nothing. I look at him expectantly.

  The white in the room suddenly seems blinding, as if a glaring sun were reflecting off pristine ice. Everything is blinding. Or is it me? I want color. I want movement.

  I hear Zandor’s voice as if from a loud speaker, hollow, pealing, “My dear doctor, you are a nice lady, and I’m sure you know your medical specialty. I am willing to tolerate another round of examinations, though I’m growing weary of the whole process. I would like a definitive prognosis from you as soon as possible. Today. In two hours. Do I make myself clear?”

  He sounds hostile, but I know him and understand it is simply his way, to the point, blunt, no farting around, bottom line.

  Dr. Lamont does not smile, but she looks at Zan with a penetrating gaze and says, “Mr. Kirsch, if you don’t know it yet, you will soon. I am a candid person. I will do the tests and report the results. There is no hyperbole and no deceit. You will know what we know, when we know it. Agreed?”

  Zandor smiles, looks at his wife and me, and says, “I’m in love with this doctor. She’s my kind of woman.” He turns back and says to Dr. Lamont, “Bring it on!”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The drive home, in rush-hour traffic, is dismal. In the best of moods, I cannot tolerate the stop-go inanity of Los Angeles freeways, and now, after our nearly three-hour experience with Dr. Lamont and her aides, I am feeling sour and irritable. If it were not that I love Gwen and Zan deeply, I likely would pick at them, perhaps even insult them with my brittle attitude.

  What I realize is that they are also distressed and on the edge of open despair.

  Dr. Pamela Lamont, after perusing the CAT scan, analyzing blood samples (remarkably fast!) and studying all previous medical records, told us in a professional, yet melancholy tone that she was not encouraged. “It is,” she concluded, “not feasible to operate, since the cancer cells are systemic. We can try the chemicals as a last resort. It will mean coming here twice a week for three hours for the chemdrip treatment. We should know in four weeks if it is doing any good.”

  Zan seemed hardly fazed when he heard the pronouncement. It was as if he knew all along.

  I drop them off at their home. It is already dark. In my townhouse, the red light on my voice mail is blinking.

  “Ted, it’s Megan. I know you have been out in Duarte with Gwen and Zandor. Please call and tell me any news. I’m worried about all three of you.”

  Caring, but business-like. Nothing to do with her and me. Hell, what did I expect? Before I call her back I sense that I need to think through my stance. What if the subject of her and me comes up? How do I handle it?

  I hate rehearsals. They clutter up my brain with “supposed to” kinds of thinking, and retard my ability to think on my feet. I have always been proud of my creativity in coming up with spur-of-the-moment allusions to all sorts of historical events, to recall anecdotes that clinch a point, even as I have grown older, the capacity to lecture to my classes with unfettered imagination. Sitting down and pondering what I want to say to Megan goes against my life-long modus operandi. Yet, I am terrified that once I am speaking with her, I will blow it, blunder my way into a verbal corner, and worst of all, embarrass myself with my confusion.

  To hell with it! I punch in her number. Whatever words come out of my untutored lips will have to suffice. I cherish my spontaneity.

  She answers. At first, I think it is her voice mail, but when there is a silence following her, “Good evening,” I realize she is live and in person and blurt out, “It’s me, Ted.”

  “Oh, Teddy, tell me. What’s happening?”

  “It’s not good news. Same diagnosis. The possibility of chemical treatment, but not hopeful.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I hear a half-stifled but impassioned sob.

  “It is a battle. He will have to fight for his life.”

  A momentary silence, then, “Yes, only it seems the cards are stacked against a victory.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And you?” she asks. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m numb. The whole thing seems like a dream.” I flash on my now deceased, one-time neurotic old friend, Tillie the rapist, and his ultra-realistic nightmares, my only consolation being that I am aware of the difference between dreams and reality.

  Megan is quiet again, and I can only guess at what she is struggling to say. At last, she speaks softly and with clear concern. “I want to share this awful experience with you. Can I come over?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Is it a bad time?”

  “No!” I say too quickly, with a dumb scold in my tone. Then, aware that I could use a sympathetic ear, I blurt out, “I mean, yes, do come over.”

  How stupid of me. I need a lot more than sympathy. Fortunately, she reads the deeper message.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour. Can I bring anything?”

  “Only your remarkable self.”

  I do not exaggerate. She is, my former stepdaughter, a remarkable self. As I think back on the days with Julie, my love for my wife was solid and unwavering, and yet I recall that Megan had a magnetism that one could only file away with that long list of life situations regrettably labeled ‘if only.’ I am certainly not a pedophile, and I never once entertained erotic thoughts about the teen-aged Megan. Yet, even then I knew there was something special in how she attacked life. In truth, I have a distaste for military descriptors, so I might better say she was special in how she engaged life. I do remember thinking what a handful she would be in a relationship.

  I now set about putting my place in order, cleaning up the few dishes in the sink, trashing three days of newspapers scattered about my coffee table, gathering up the notes surrounding my computer and shelving them in my ‘to be done’ pile. Foul as my mood has been, this visit is an elixir, for me as an older person, a rare and uplifting event: to be alone in my home with a lovely young woman who may—though I am shaky about the certainty of this—have personal feelings for me.

  When I allow myself to think in such a way, I instantly retreat and condemn my own audacity. I am old, goddamn it, and friendly as Megan is, loving as she may profess to be, those affections do not translate into a partnering kind of intimate relationship.

  She is true to her word, arriving in just under thirty minutes and eschewing the bell for three solid raps on my front door. My heart rate spirals upward, my breathing becomes labored, as foolishly, sanguinely, I see this encounter as a crucial opportunity, perhaps the last I will ever have to confront my un-partnered, bachelorly style of life.

  When I open the door, she moves toward me with the elegance and confidence of a self-assured woman, embracing me in a delicious hug. As we separate, she looks me straight in my eyes and says, “Teddy, I am devastated, and I haven’t even known Zandor for years. It must be the ugliest of times for you.” She holds onto my hand as we move into the living room.

  Her empathy fills me with anguish, flooding my eyes with a lake of tears, which Megan sees, of course, and she tightens her fingers around my hand.

  Despite my attempt to be stoic, I say, my voice tremulous, “I am so grateful for your caring. Zan’s wife is there, thankfully, so he has someone around him, but I want so much to help and there is virtually nothing I can do.”

  She is silent for a time, looks at me curiously—or at least that is how I read it—and says, “Ted, I want to know what you are doing for you. Zan knows you love him. His illness will play out one way or another. But, you aren’t ill, and your life will go on.” She hesitates, appearing to gather energy, and continues, “It may seem brazen to you, but I want you healthy, physically and emotionally.” She lets o
ut a little laugh. “It’s a selfish thing. I’ve discovered you again after all these years. I don’t want a despondent Ted, but a flourishing one.”

  From her careful wording, I can’t tell how personal her concern is; well, it is personal, but it could be as a devoted, longtime friend. My own insecurity stirs a lighthearted reply.

  “Oh, I do too. A flourishing Ted is so much more life-affirming. I want a flourishing Megan as well.” I realize as I say this that it detracts from the urgency of her want.

  She looks agitated, walks a few steps away from me, and says, “I see you on the edge of despair over your friend. His survival is out of your hands. To mourn him makes perfect sense. To become depressed over it does not. All we have is our lives. We have to live them as fully and robustly as we can.”

  Her words make me wonder which one of us is the professor. The wisdom astounds me and I flash on a quote from the Buddhists: “If the student is not better than the teacher, the teacher is a failure.”

  To Megan I say, “You are absolutely correct. I’m trying to absorb what you’re saying. I’ve lost some important people in my life and managed to survive—in fact to thrive. Why this tragedy with Zan fills me with such dread is hard to explain. Perhaps it’s because he’s my age, has shared most of my life’s adventures with me, and not having him around any more would be some kind of signal about my own decay.”

  “Oh, Teddy,” she says and sits next to me on my two-seater couch, her hand on my arm. “You are a million miles from decay. I see vigor and the glow of youth in your manner. Zan’s cancer is an accident of how he lived his life. It is not related to your survival or longevity.”

  What does she see in me? Yes, I am sick with anguish over Zan’s illness. Yes, I pull myself down, allow my spirits to sink. But, she is seeing more, a kind of defeatist posture, a form of hopelessness, which I often pick up in my depressed psychology clients. I am not aware that I give off that aura, communicate such a melancholy message.

  Am I simply becoming melancholic in my elder years? Is it part of the bargain? Does it come with the territory? Do all folks, in their declining years, embrace the half empty thing? I have, all along, been proud of my up-beat view of life: a smorgasbord set out on a long table, for all to take, at whatever age and in whatever amounts they are capable, something for everyone, from age one to a hundred and one. Have I changed? Though Megan says she experiences me as youthful and energetic, is Zandor’s desperate situation causing me to give off a kind of gloomy, pitiful graveyard ooze? If so, I want to correct that image.

  We sit in semi-silence for a solid minute, intruded upon only by a CD of Rodrigo’s Aranjuez Guitar Concierto played by Pepe Romero who, at this point in his long career, resides in Los Angeles.

  Megan appears to be off-balance and at last she says, “Ted, tell me, why do you think you live alone?” She smiles cautiously and adds, “You’re a charming, virile, interesting, appealing man, and seriously inaccessible.”

  This is it. She has moved it over to the man-woman agenda. How do I respond? Do I even know a plausible answer?

  I feel a slow reddening rising along my neck as I open my palms and say, “I have a problem.”

  I stop, and she tilts her head, waiting. When I hesitate, she repeats, as a good counselor would, “A problem,” and again waits.

  “Two things. When you’re twenty-five or thirty and ask someone for a date, and she says she’s busy this week but how about a week from Saturday, you’re fine with it. The delay’s not an issue. At my point in life, I don’t feel as if I have time to postpone things. If a woman puts me off, even temporarily, I walk away.

  “And the second thing is, although I’m not sure I know myself very well, one thing I do know is that I’m not an easy person to please. In looking for a relationship, I mean.”

  “Tell me more,” she says, patient as mountains.

  “I’ll try,” I say, impatient as the sea.

  “It has to do with expectations. See, I kid myself that at my advanced years I can still attract a beauty. I mean a woman’s age is not my fetish, but her good looks is. Now that’s sick, I know, because here I am aging, wrinkled, past my prime, yet unwilling to settle for a woman who is aging, wrinkled and past her prime, even if she is clever, brilliant, good-hearted and compassionate. How dumb is that? Whom am I going to attract?”

  Again, there is a deep silence, this time heavy with portent. I am afraid to look at Megan. I feel tawdry, as if I have been mewling like a neglected kitten, or shamelessly taking extra bows, like an insecure actor milking an audience for applause.

  I stare at my hands, limp on my lap, fully ashamed of my self-serving tirade, but then, as if from a far-off hilltop, bounding across pristine valleys and plains, comes a word that will forever echo in my ears, a remarkable word, heavenly, impossible.

  “Me,” Megan says.

  I look up slowly, terrified that I have misheard. My eyes catch hers. I stare, unsure, my look a question, my response timid, desperate.

  “What?”

  “Me,” she says again. “Your question was who are you going to attract. My answer is, me.”

  “But Megan…”

  “No buts,” she interrupts. “I know you don’t think of me in a romantic way. After all, I’m—I mean I was—your stepdaughter. And I’ll bet you never knew that when I was fifteen I had a crush on you. Talk about sick! When does a teenager have a thing about her stepfather?”

  “I never…”

  “Of course not. I would have died if anybody knew. And imagine my mother’s reaction. Her little baby with a schoolgirl fantasy about her husband.”

  “I didn’t have a clue about any of that.”

  “I know. That was partly why I ran away. I could never have my mother’s man.”

  “But the other, that you know I don’t think of you in a romantic way…”

  “Well, how could you? To you I’m a student, naïve, unschooled, hardly an equal partner.”

  “Wait, wait, let me finish. I do, I do, I do!”

  “You do what?”

  “Think of you in a romantic way. Dream of you. Fantasize about you. Fruitlessly, because I knew, I know, it can never be.”

  Now we both sit in stunned silence.

  In a moment we start to speak, simultaneously, stumble on our words and stop, uncertain where to go next.

  Finally, slowly and deliberately, Megan says, “If I’m not completely crazy, I think we’ve been saying the same words. Each of us feels something special about the other. It’s not a one-way thing.”

  “It’s not,” I echo, “but I can’t believe it. Do you know what you’d be getting into?”

  “Do you know what you’d be getting into?”

  “I’m an old fart. I may only have fifteen or twenty years.”

  “Better than forty with some insensitive dude.”

  “You might have to take care of me if I get sick.”

  “You might have to take care of me if I blow off too much steam.”

  As we speak, we lean closer to each other, our eyes unwavering, as if we’ve discovered, at last, some magic we’d both been aching for.

  “I may not be able to keep up with you.”

  “I may need to learn to slow down.”

  “What if I don’t feel like flying to Hawaii?”

  “What if I don’t care about vacations?”

  Our faces are inches apart.

  “I worry,” she whispers, “that you may not be sexually attracted to me, may not care to make love with me.”

  “Never happen!” I say, and smother her mouth with mine.

  Nothing is said. We are all talked out.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It is January, a dreary day with darkly lowering skies and slanting rain blowing in from the southwest.

  Zandor’s cancer has done its deadly work, blunting and finally stifling the functions of his internal organs, liver, pancreas, bladder, and lastly his heart. Gwen, Megan and I sat at his bedside and watched him breathe d
eeply, one long last inhale, and expire. The hospice woman, familiar with death, nodded and initiated her morbid routine.

  Now, at the memorial service, I volunteer to speak, not sure I am sturdy enough to pull it off, but wanting to honor my lovely friend.

  “A life,” I say to a crowd of over forty friends and family, assembled in the living room of what is now Gwen’s home, “unless familiar to the broader culture through politics or entertainment, is mainly the precious property of those it personally has touched. Anyone touched by Zandor’s life was never the same, would never forget it.

  “His physical self has been viciously devoured by disease, and yet, he lives on, in memory and appreciation.

  “As his friend from childhood, I have forgotten more touch-points than I remember. Those I do remember are rich with humor, sarcasm, heady victories, regrettable defeats, the delicacies of elegant food and drink, sweet joys of family passages.

  “I’m sure he thought of me as naïve and reticent, since he took so many more risks than I. That might have been his hallmark: face a challenge head-on. He did it in sport, in business, and in love. He was, alas, overwhelmed in the fight for his life.

  “It is not that people die, it is that worlds die that are in them. Zandor’s world was a tribute to his expansive heart, a heart that absorbed mountains of knowledge, oceans of love, continents of compassion for humanity.

  “Here was a man who gave and gave and gave, and it never hurt. He expected no balancing of the books. Giving did not imply receiving. I know, since I was a major recipient of his world of gifts.

  “I have lost him, you have lost him, the land of the living has lost him. Never again anything new. I have the old stuff, in here,” I point to my heart, “and up here,” I point to my head, “but never anything new.

  “Zan has left his family and friends a wonderful legacy, one that does not come from monetary wealth or property, but from the accumulated bounties of his personality and style.

  “I, for one, shall, in fact, find the book of life on Zandor Kirsch, in balance, since each time I think of him, the grief at his passing will be matched with a silent chuckle of joy at all his life had to offer.