And that’s the last thing I remember seeing, because that’s when everything went dark, and all I heard were cries of alarm and surprise, and at first I thought all of them had seen the same thing as me: Vivian, winking on Broadway and 52nd, looking as gorgeous as she ever did in 1934, but here in 1999, when she should’ve been ninety or dead.
With my phone in my hand, and Uncle Paul’s voice terse on the other end—not his secretary, not Aunt Linda, usually in charge of all things family—I think of the time I saw a scaffolding fall, because of the sensation in my chest: a raucous collapsing. I can almost hear the clanging. Someone’s dead.
The guy on the scaffolding had been up there doing something to the masonry on one of those woebegone crumbly old buildings which seem to have been forgotten amidst all the jutting glass and steel. The man was fine, other than that he probably pissed himself with fear. His harness thing caught and he grabbed the side and sort of rode it down. No, the amazing thing was the sound, a series of metallic clangs as the platform smashed its way along the metal supports and bounced off that stone façade. The racket was loud enough and long enough for pigeons and pedestrians to scatter. We—the other commuters and I safely across the street—stood mesmerized by the slow-motion nature of the destruction. For a while I got nervous walking under scaffolding but like everything else, you get used to it again.
“Eleanor,” Paul says now, jerking me out of the memory, into the grim reality of whatever news he has to deliver. “Your grandfather collapsed this morning.”
“Oh, no. How is he? He’s not…?”
“He’s at Lenox Hill Hospital now. They’re not sure what happened, but apparently he was walking home from the office and he just fell down on the sidewalk. It looks like he had a stroke.”
“It’s so hot today! Why didn’t he take the car?”
“You’re telling me. I don’t know why not. I’m on my way down there.”
“Is anyone with him now?”
“Joel was already there on rounds, so he’s checking on him. I’ll be there soon. Don’t feel like you have to rush right over right this second. They’re running tests and things now and it’ll be some time before you can see him, I just wanted you to know right away, because… Well, you know. Anyway. Gotta go, Ellie.”
My fingers dial before I can decide not to, before I’ve even realized the note with Daniel’s new phone number is in my hand.
“Eleanor?”
I loathe caller ID. Daniel’s voice is already rich with suspicion, even dread.
“Grampa Milo collapsed today.”
“Oh, geez, honey.” His voice instantly softens. “Is he okay? Are you?”
“I’m not sure, and I don’t know.”
“Umm…”
He could have an audition, but he might be headed to a temp job. His degree is in English and so far that’s gotten him proofreading gigs here and there, sometimes he answers the phones and makes copies. Better than pouring Budweiser for tourists, he always says. I also know he pushes back against actor stereotypes, and that includes the standard-issue actor-waiter. In this suspension of time I wish I hadn’t called. He’s an ex now, and what am I supposed to expect from him?
“Which hospital?” he says now, and I tell him Lenox Hill.
“I can be there in an hour. Do you have your cell phone on you?”
“No, forget it, I shouldn’t have troubled you…”
“You called me for a reason, Ellie. I’m not going to leave you hanging like this. See you soon.” He hangs up, and it requires two shaky tries for me to replace the receiver back into its cradle before I sink into my desk chair.
I know he won’t leave me hanging, and somehow his kindness makes this worse.
It was not quite a week ago that Daniel greeted me with the famous “Can we talk?” line.
I’d been at my desk then, too, chewing the tip of my pen to a flattened, gnarly triangle as I stared at notes for my next interview. What followed was one of those tedious, excruciating talks where one just wants it all over with, and the other wants to understand. I played the role of the one seeking understanding, though I really did know. It just felt necessary to ask, anyway, like we really were on stage somewhere, and the audience was expecting certain things from us before curtain.
This feeling was heightened when I made some remark about, “Can’t believe you’re leaving me” and he retorted, “You’ve been leaving me for a long time.”
“Ha,” I answered back, though it came out lifelessly, without the sting that I’d wanted. “That’s from a play. I know because I ran the lines with you.”
Finally, Daniel rose and said he was sorry for hurting me by leaving, but that he didn’t think I’d hurt so long, anyway. And he closed the door carefully and locked it from the outside, because he was always considerate like that. Even though we lived in a doorman building, he wasn’t going to leave me vulnerable behind an unlocked door.
When I finally hauled myself up out of the chair, dazed like I’d been sucker-punched, my gaze lighted on a slip of paper on the coffee table. Staying at Tom’s, he’d written, and then included the phone number. He hadn’t written it during our talk. He’d prepared it ahead. How far ahead? How many nights did he sit with me over takeout, watching Seinfeld, planning this?
I tried to tell myself Daniel couldn’t be expected to memorize my work schedule, that he had no idea he was ripping my life in half just before an important assignment.
Daniel likely didn’t realize that I’d spent the previous five days talking myself up for that interview like a prizefighter, all but dancing back and forth and jabbing the air. That this assignment from Skyscraper magazine was a coup. I’d be interviewing a grieving mother in Brooklyn, who was demanding police take action in the supposed accidental death of her son. The authorities had written off his death by car crash as a sadly common tragedy: kids don’t look where they’re going, do they? But his mother smelled something rotten in how fast they came to that conclusion in favor of the wealthy driver of that glossy black BMW. It looked to be my toughest interview yet, by a mile and then some.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Maybe it was already written in the book of life that I’d start shaking as the mother started yelling at me.
My editor, John, had reminded me that I couldn’t just accept her rendering of the facts, sympathetic though she was. I had to be as thorough with Mrs. Ashanti Greene as I would with the police later. It was because of this coaxing from John that I’d written the questions in my notebook like a script, so I could read the words one by one and not chicken out. So I read from my script and asked, “How can you be so sure it wasn’t simply an accident that your son was run over? Kids do get run over sometimes, especially if they dart out in the road.”
So that’s when she started with the yelling, and I started with the shaking and crying.
She hollered, “How dare you cry when it’s my son that’s dead? When all I’m saying is truth, how dare you?”
Breakup or not, perhaps it was already ordained I’d bolt from that grieving mother’s kitchen without another word. That I would throw up in a garbage can and wipe my face with a piece of paper from my notebook before running through Bed-Stuy until I could find a cab.
So when John fired me—much as anyone can fire a freelancer—perhaps that was inevitable, too. I thought he might give me an easier assignment, one like I’d been doing before. Everyone loved my profile of a guy who gave popular, impromptu performances from his West Village fire escape. Likely because it was Rat Pack jazz and not rap, the cops yelled out requests instead of shutting him down.
No nice, friendly profile assignments for me. John said I needed a good long break.
I’d been making a paper clip chain while John made me wait for him in his office, and I’d for some reason still had the thing in my hand as I drifted out of the offices and plopped down under a tree in Bryant Park to get my bearings. It would have been foolish to return a handful of paperclips, and woul
d I unlink them first? It seemed wasteful to throw them away. So I carried them home with me, into the apartment, here they still are, strewn over the notebook I’d clutched in that Brooklyn kitchen with its curling linoleum and faux wood grain table with the one short leg.
Now I pick them up, those paperclips, and I find myself passing them through my fingers like a Catholic with a rosary, as I pace this apartment in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows meant to give the illusion of space in this city where we’re crawling all over each other like ants in a hill.
Since Uncle Paul’s call just minutes ago, I’m bowled over with regret that I bolted from the last family dinner so quickly; if I’d only known that Grampa was about to… I try to absolve myself: how could you have known? But then: he’s almost ninety. Any day could be the last day. Grampa had been holding court as usual, recounting the funniest opening night mishaps he could recall, including the time a corpse started giggling on stage. The actor had apparently felt a sneeze coming on, and was holding it in while making like a dead body, and somehow it struck him funny what it would look like if he did indeed sneeze. The sneeze, the nerves, trying not to breathe too obviously, it all struck him so hilarious he could no longer stop himself. “The schmuck should have just sneezed!” Grampa cried, and everyone roared with laughter. I should have stayed and enjoyed the fun, even though I’d heard that story maybe a dozen times. Instead I chose to evade family interrogation over the absence of Daniel.
Anyway, soon enough they’ll get a hold of me, and it will go like this: What could have gone so wrong? He was such a nice young man, and worked so hard (implied afterthought: for an actor).
For the sake of something like dignity, I would refuse to divulge the existence of lithe, pretty Moira with her cap of black hair and her eyes blue like lapis. I’d come back weakly with, “We’ve grown apart” and my aunt would retort, “Nonsense! You have so much in common!” by which they mean, “You’re both nice Jewish kids and you’d make adorable babies so get to it already.”
Daniel had already taken his things, which we’d arranged in one brief, brittle phone conversation. I’d arranged to be out at a show so he’d have several hours. When I came back to the apartment—really Uncle Paul’s place, he lets me live here at a laughably low token rent—and saw it denuded of my ex’s scripts, leather jacket, books, and vinyl records he never played but liked to thumb through, I sighed, dusted my hands, and thought, that’s that. This wasn’t painless for me, of course, but had anyone seen me, they might have thought so. Daniel has accused me more than once of too easily shutting down. I could never convince him that some people—those of us not actors, those of us not show-offy hams who advertise every fleeting emotion to the world—feel things quietly, internally. I feel plenty, I just don’t feel it’s everybody’s goddamn business.
Now I’d gone and ripped off this particular scab by calling Daniel because Grampa had a stroke. But else could I do? When everything goes wrong, you reach for those who know you best, who know you at your worst.
Here in my empty, quiet apartment, I stroke the glass of my late father’s watch, torn in two by my equal impulses to fly to Grampa Milo’s side, and to hide under the bed rather than go into another hospital. My father should have died at home, in hospice care, but the cancer played a mean trick and jumped out and got him when we weren’t expecting it. As if cancer wasn’t bad enough all by itself.
“This isn’t the same, and Grampa needs me,” I remind myself out loud, my voice ringing hollow in the still air. And so I am moving with determination and speed now, as if I could outrun the death of my father, as if I wouldn’t carry the memory with me all the way to Lenox Hill.
I stare at the brick across 77th Street until the mortar lines start to waver and look like something out of Escher. I half-wish I still smoked so I could have a reason to be out here in the heavy July heat, instead of in the artificial cold next to Grampa Milo’s hospital bed.
But nausea had been crawling through my guts and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Clenching or relaxing, either way made it worse. In my twenty-three years, I had plenty of experience with older generations putting a brave spin on things for my benefit, but staring into Grampa Milo’s confused face, I saw this privilege would be afforded me no longer. He was letting me see his fear; he’d never looked so sick and lost. When Naomi and her husband, Joshua, swooped in a few minutes ago, I made a dash for the outside, just for a bit, just to breathe and think.
Over my left shoulder appears a shadow I can’t ignore, so I look up into the soft brown eyes of my cousin Joel, who snuck up on me so quick he might have grown up out of the sidewalk.
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
My doctor-cousin, biggest success story of all the Short progeny, puts on his “reassurance face.” “He’s going to be fine, we think. His vitals are good.”
“I know. You said. So why can’t he talk?”
“The CT scan indicates an embolic stroke, and there’s an area of deficit around the infarct that appears to be causing his expressive aphasia.”
“For God’s sake, Joel.”
“Sorry. He had a stroke which is keeping him from speaking. That’s what aphasia means. He can think of the word but can’t get it out. The stroke also affected motor control; in this case his right hand and leg are weak, especially the hand.”
“Oh, my God. Will he ever be able to write again?”
“We hope so. He’s a tough old gent, and therapy can help him get these things back.”
“Even at eighty-eight?”
“I’ve seen it before.”
“Now what happens?”
“He has to see the neurologist, and all the various therapists will come in to see him. A speech path, physical therapist, occupational therapist, et cetera. They want to evaluate him and determine placement.”
“Placement where? What does that mean?”
“They will likely recommend a nursing home setting for the time being, to keep an eye on him and for therapy, but it sounds like Aunt Rebekah is on the war path about it and he’ll probably come home with twenty-four/seven nursing care.”
“Well, good. Grampa Milo would hate those places.”
I finally look away from the brick to face my cousin, and his shiny forehead is creased. He’s tall and prematurely balding, and the combined effect is to make him look like he’s growing through his own hair.
“There are some excellent facilities with wonderful staff. But yeah, El. I know what you mean.”
A familiar movement in my peripheral vision snags my attention. Before I even turn my head all the way I can tell who it is. Daniel has a distinct, loping gait that I’ve always been able to pick out of a crowd long before I can even read his face.
Joel utters one confused syllable: “Huh.”
“Never mind,” I tell him, my voice full of warning.
By this time, Daniel has approached us. He thrusts out a hand toward Joel, makes his inquiries, and my cousin gives an abbreviated version of what he just told me.
After he sums it all up, and Daniel nods his sad commiseration, Joel doesn’t seem to be leaving, though he must have someplace important to be. I wish for his pager to sound off, to make him stop giving Daniel that “sizing up” look.
Daniel breaks the silence. “So Joel, how are those babies?”
“Hungry, my God. Either Jessica or the nanny are feeding one of them at any given moment. How do the families where kids outnumber the adults ever do it? Oy, I can’t imagine.”
I break in with, “You mean you haven’t heard the Eva Monologues on Proper Parenting?”
“I always make sure I get paged. Look, I better get back in. Hang in there, Ellie. Bye, Daniel.”
And so he’s sucked back into the building, looking at his watch, his white coat flapping away behind him.
Daniel steps closer to me and asks me how I am, and I answer with a shrug.
“So Joel knows? About us?”
“I had to expl
ain why you weren’t at the family dinner. He’s trying to figure out why you’re here now.”
“I told you, I wouldn’t just abandon you at a time like this.”
“Well, he’s going to live, so you’re in the clear now.”
“Don’t do that, El. You called me, I came. I’m not the bad guy. But seriously, are you okay? I can’t tell, when you get like this. When you go all ‘statue’ on me.”
By this time I’m facing him, but he’s enough taller than me it’s easier to focus on the flaking print on his Pearl Jam concert T-shirt than it is to crane my neck to look him in the face. It’s bright, too. The sun is pouring out rivers of heat and light, and my head has begun to throb.
“I’m scared for him. He can’t talk, his right hand is affected, he can’t write. What kind of life is he going to have without words?”
Daniel turns so we’re shoulder-to-shoulder, both staring at the same masonry wall, and he drapes his long arm loosely over me, tucking his hand under my hair. For a moment he’s uncharacteristically still. I almost hate to break the spell.
But in the quiet, I answer my own question: at least it’s life of a sort. At least Grampa Milo is still here.
I reach up to briefly clasp Daniel’s hand where it rests on my shoulder, and step away from him. I lead the way back into the hospital, where my grandfather lies mute and scared, but alive.
At my piano, I should be comfortable. It’s the first place I ever felt so, after all, way back in the Bronx days when my father finally made enough money to buy us one. It was meant for Leah, but she never took to it, not like me.
And it shouldn’t be so bad, either, playing one-handed. But it’s my right hand that doesn’t work, leaving only my left for harmony, unless I try to force my left hand fingers into straining awkwardly to play the melodic line.
Haltingly, messing up the phrasing, I plink out, The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea….
Vivian In Red Page 2