The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  A middle-aged man, his bald head as shiny as a hubcap, stood next to the car, hitching up his pants and running his fingers over the fender, the door lock, the gesture at once curious and sort of sensual, since he kept his eyes on Sara. Sara talked fast, and although I couldn’t hear it, I’d bet she went on about the features of this item, the computer-adjusted non-lock brakes that could save you in a bad skid, the treatment on the leather seats, the ease with which you could get to the spare tire and the automatic jack that came down from the undercarriage near each well, etc., and how Madonna or someone like that drove one of these, and how, too, it felt so great, sort of like being young, to look at the glow of dials at night, the needles in them jiggling back and forth. Or maybe she pointed out how he could put the thing in four-wheel drive when it snowed and all the other poor bastards were stuck and the owner of this silver rig could just boogie right along, right to work, or wherever his final destination might be. Airplane talk, she had told me, was good for selling cars. She leaned toward him: How was she going to get that eighty thousand dollars? That is, if they wanted two kidneys now. I am sure she recognized me, since she closed her eyes as though to concentrate, to come to terms with the passage of time, the way innocence leaves you with the knowledge you had only after it’s already gone. She had felt it, too, in the library all those years ago, when I touched her hand and looked at those pictures of the stars.

  The Hertz rental stopped in front of the condo, the building somehow wrong, as though the architect who had designed it had just finished work on a prison, a sort of minimum-security one, where hedge fund guys go, and so while it was supposed to look inviting, behind the poured concrete walls and the small windows and the retro-yet-modern towers at the corners of the place (which were adapted, I’d bet, from guard platforms), you sensed the essence of a prison. People waiting. Here, of course, the waiting was the worst, and made it seem like a cleaned-up death row. Old people lived here before they died, or moved to a nursing home, which was the same thing, only at a faster rate.

  The concrete walk to the condo was curved like something from a theme park about elves or fairies, you know, those little creatures that live under mushrooms like mutant umbrellas. But I just wanted to get the Samsung set up and to be on my way.

  In the living room we lifted it out of the box, Gloria touching my hand now and obviously thinking it over a little, still amazed, I think, by the mixture of anger and sparkly sex, and by my apology, too, and hers, and how things had exploded that way but now seemed or could seem fine. It was enough to make you uneasy about how things appeared. (Were the trappings of everyday life normal or bizarre?)

  We set up the Blu-ray and the Samsung, turned on her grandmother’s computer, and started entering the codes to stream to the Blu-ray. The grandmother and Gloria looked like two apples, one right off the tree and one that had been in the back of the refrigerator for six months. The grandmother’s name was Blanche, and she blinked like that withered apple, that is, if a withered apple wore glasses that made its eyes look as big as eggs.

  “I wanna watch High Noon,” said Blanche.

  “He doesn’t want to watch High Noon,” said Gloria.

  She pointed at me.

  “It’s about some dumb white guy,” I said.

  “Listen,” said Gloria.

  “Gary Cooper is white,” said Blanche. “Who said he wasn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Gloria.

  “Come on, Jake. And when are you two going to get married. Huh? Gloria?”

  “It’ll be a while,” she said.

  So we watched High Noon, Grace Kelly like something from another world, from out there where the stars are made, and once Gloria leaned her thigh against me, and I whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . ,” and she said, “Me too, me too, me too.” Then the marshal, that’s Gary Cooper, throws down the badge (fuck this and the horse it rode in on, fuck sacrifice, devotion, honor, dignity . . . and I was left up in the air, not sure what I was sorry about, just desperate to have all of this go away for a while). I packed up the cardboard and that funny white stuff that’s half paper and half plastic, left the manual on the table, and went out the door. Then Gloria came out behind me and said, “So, thanks for setting it up.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “You’re going to recycle this stuff?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said. “Out behind the Home Depot?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Look,” she said. “It was just a bad time between us. That’s all. Bound to happen. With the distance and everything. Living so far apart. Let’s forget it, huh?”

  She looked down at her shoes.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Just fine.”

  Blanche came to the door and said to me, “Jake, you don’t look so good. You want some Pepto-Bismol?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I think I better get this cardboard to the recycling bin.”

  “I’ll call you,” said Gloria.

  “Sure. Sure. Everything’s fine.”

  “Is it?” she said. “I can be such a bitch.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to see,” she said.

  “You could stay for the weekend, like always,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll go home. I like to think on the plane.”

  A WEEK LATER, WITH Einstein looking down on me while I graded advanced astronomy papers at home, his expression not so mystified as when Gloria had been here but still somewhat startled, I think, at some of the answers students had provided about the Doppler shift for light. I worked at home when I could, because when I was at the university, in my office, graduate students came in with that constant terror they seem to have. If it is a school of fish and a gaggle of geese, it should be an angst of graduate students. I worked at home. Three days a week.

  My father’s car pulled into the driveway. The movement of the thing, the quickness of the stop, the way in which he got out of the 4Runner (which the state provided so he could get up some roads that weren’t more than dry river beds, and small ones at that), his slouched, direct, no-nonsense gait up to the front door left me thinking, or maybe even saying for that matter, “Oh, shit.”

  Einstein’s expression changed, too, from the mildly mystified to something else, which was a look of the most piercing terror. Even he knew.

  It was a Wednesday. Of course, my father should have been at work. He brought with him the whiff of a doctor’s office: a perfume of disinfectant and that new soap they use to fight staph, Steris, which comes in little dispensers in every office. He walked right in. The engine of his car idled. The papers I corrected fluttered like a crippled bird as they fell from my lap, the calculus on them looking neat, but it was probably wrong. Then the screen door made a screech that even put Einstein on edge, and when I stood next to my father, the 4Runner’s heavy chug-a-chug-a-chug loud in the monk-like room and the exhaust of it stinking the place up, he said, “I was wondering, Jake, if you’d like to go fishing?”

  “You’ve gone to see a doctor?” I said.

  “I was just wondering if you’d like to go fishing. Furnace Creek. Put your things in the back now, and then tomorrow, maybe around three or so, you come over to my house and we can go. Right from there. OK?”

  He stared straight ahead. Not crying. Not yet. Just staring through the window.

  “How’s the back?” I said.

  He rubbed his chin, as though considering some problem in which no matter what you did you were going to be wrong.

  “Fine,” he said. “Come on. You keep your stuff in this closet, right?”

  The waders smelled sort of like a freeze-dried stream. My father took out the vest and the rod and I took the waders and a sleeping bag that was already leaking some feathers, and then all these things were arranged neatl
y in the back of the car behind the backseat, vest next to rod, waders next to bag, as though order and precision would help. Instead, it looked like the disorder of that Hawaiian shirt worn by the guy who had shot the manager of the Radio Shack. The engine made that chug-a-chug-a sound, not as the promise of escape but of something else altogether. Like the muzzle hole of a pistol.

  “So, three tomorrow afternoon, all right?” he said. “I’ve got some stuff to do.”

  “Doctor stuff?” I said.

  “Look,” he said. “Are we going fishing or are we going to stand around here jawing all day?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said.

  “Sometimes there’s nothing to wonder about. You know that.”

  “But you kept your promise to me?” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I mean about having that back . . . ”

  “Pain,” he said. “Is that what you are afraid to say?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Just be there at three, OK?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Thanks, Jake. You know I love you, don’t you?”

  Still not crying, but he sat there, behind the wheel, his eyes on the windshield. A bunch of bugs were stuck to the glass (pale morning duns, as nearly as I could tell, smashed the way they were, and this meant the fishing was going to be good). He sat there. I went into the house and brought out the Windex and a rag and sprayed the Windex on, the stuff having that scent of ammonia that seemed as though it could fix anything. I lifted the wipers to get underneath them, and he said, “Thanks, Jake.”

  Einstein glanced down with more empathy now. The papers didn’t seem to want to be knocked square, and when I went through them I wrote a shitty comment (“The exponent becomes the multiplier, you dumb shit”) and then spent fifteen minutes scratching it out and holding it up to the window to make sure it couldn’t be seen (reminding myself again that this is what I did to justify the research budget I had and that I shouldn’t write things to students when I was scared), and, in fact, I was doing this when the phone rang and Sara said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m going fishing,” I said.

  “No plans?” she said. “Just like that? Bang. With your father?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock. My father’s house.”

  “Hmpf,” she said.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Me?” she said. “Ah, well, you know . . . nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, maybe I should go fishing, too,” she said.

  “I’ll take you,” I said.

  “Will you, Jake?” she said. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone ever said to me.”

  Einstein looked down with that knowing expression, but all I could think about was that stupid asshole with the gun and the Hawaiian shirt, Sara’s screenplay about the first woman pope, and the guy who had thrown her out of some New York talent agency. “I’ll call you when I get back,” I said to Sara.

  “If there’s enough time,” she said. “MD says he wants me to drive a car to Mexico. Maybe, he says, I could stop along the way. Get a good night’s sleep. He’ll make the reservation.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “I sold three Outbacks, a Forester, and an Impreza. Do you know, Jake, that an Impreza has a premium audio system with a USB port and iPod control capability? The sales were a record. The regional sales manager is going to get me a plaque.”

  We listened to the sound of the age: that sort of black sound the phone makes when no one is saying anything, a sort of static like that some radio telescopes make . . . Something there, but what is it?

  “What’s that quiver in your voice?” I said.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking about old times. Well, Jake,” she said. “I hope you catch some fish.”

  She hung up.

  AT THREE, MY father’s car was right there, in front of his house. In the backseat, behind the driver, a lot of Xerox copies of scientific papers were piled up. You couldn’t see them in the rearview mirror, and maybe he didn’t want to see what was right behind him, not gaining on him, but something he couldn’t get away from, either. The title of the first paper was, “Rate of Esophageal Sloughing in Bone Marrow Transplants with Mitrix and Zanosar in Mixed Doses.” On the floor behind the passenger’s seat a fleece blanket, a color the high-end catalogues called burgundy, covered another pile, or at least it covered something, and I guessed it was a stack of the worst of the papers, or the ones that showed mortality rates that were just about complete, 99.9321 percent. The survivors had probably been misdiagnosed. I wondered why he didn’t just throw those away, but that was my father: He’d read one of those and try to discover if the order of the dosages was wrong or if another gene in the compatibility test was needed to make the match right.

  The house was empty when I came in. A house that is lived in by a man alone has a particular atmosphere, not a smell exactly, but a sort of scent of loneliness, or the air of longing, or maybe it is just the fact that air is only moved a very little bit (in the morning and evening) and so it takes on a quality that is like a tomb. Instinctively, you hesitate, or pull back.

  I told my father that I would call my mother.

  “She’s going to have to know,” said my father. “I’d rather not do it.”

  But he said she had dropped her cell phone in the toilet and he was going to send her some money for a new one and she wanted a Droid. Did he think he should get her a Droid?

  “If she wants a Droid get her a Droid,” I said.

  “She says the ashram has good Verizon coverage, even though it’s up on the hill above Berkeley. You must know the place.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They don’t keep the brush cut back. It’s going to burn right to the ground.”

  “Does a swami get insurance for an ashram?” he said.

  “This is a California question,” I said. “But I guess. Although it would cost a shitload if they don’t cut the brush. Is your fishing stuff in the car?”

  My father had laid out the bread for four sandwiches, and so eight pieces of bread were there, sort of like the cards on a blackjack table, and he sat there, hands in his lap, looking at the mayonnaise, then the turkey in a plastic bag, then the lettuce, then the baggies (the American chemical industry’s gift to crime), as though he could will these sandwiches into existence. So I put them together, cut them in half, just the way he liked them, not like a triangle, but like two rectangles, put them in a baggy, and then put some bottled water and two cloth napkins in a backpack. In the bathroom medicine chest three bottles stood, fentanyl, hydromorphone, and Oxycontin, ninety pills in each bottle. They’d fit right in my vest, next to the box I had for the Adams tied on a #22 hook. I took them all. A bottle of Sufenta was also there, which we were supposed to save for the end. I took that, too.

  I drove.

  My father sat next to me, and the way these things worked is that we didn’t talk about the reason for the trip, not right away, as though we had to get away from the place where the trouble was to talk about it. Still, we went out on the strip, past the clutter, the AutoZones and tire joints, the used car lots, and the rest, the Applebee’s, which looked like a three-dimensional foil package for a bargain pack of condoms.

  We could have gone on the highway, but he liked to go along the blacktop out of town where you could still see the farm stands, although now, in the fall, they didn’t have much to sell. Mostly some hothouse flowers and some potatoes that had been left over from the summer or that had been kept in a cellar until the price would go up. What you saw now were the empty shelves with a few big onions with silky skins that had that coppery color of some women’s elegant underwear. Earlier, corn would be piled up, with the kernels looking like butter, and the tomatoes as bright as lipstick, and the
carrots would be piled up, orange and green and somehow constant. Now, though, it was fall and the shelves of the farm stands were empty and showed that off-white color the planks of the shelves had been painted and which was dusty and like the color of the Xeroxed paper on the backseat. Like the belly of a snake.

  “Do you feel sick?” I said.

  “I get out of breath. And I feel sick in the morning.” He stared at the cars ahead of us. “Like I could fall down.”

  “Do you feel that way now?”

  He cleared his throat. Blinked.

  “I never lied to you, Jake. Yeah. I’m glad you’re driving.”

  The blacktop hummed under the car.

  “That makes it worse. You know, giving up. Being afraid. Not going about your life, like driving a car.”

  This is the fight that men make: being afraid and not showing it. Just standing into it, as though fear were a wind. “What are you going to do?” I said.

  He gestured to the backseat, where the Xeroxed medical papers sat, the gray whites of the pages looking somehow fishy, or like something that had had fish wrapped up in it. On the floor, just behind him, was that fleece blanket, which I wanted to ask about but which he seemed to avoid, and so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Nothing to speak of in those papers. Decreased mortality measured in weeks, not months. No mention of pain. Or much about side effects of some new drugs. You know, quack, quack, quack. Thirty-nine percent of patients show a 16 percent improvement. Thin gruel, Jake. Especially if the lining of the esophagus sloughs off after the marrow transplant and the anti-rejection drugs. Do you swallow it? The lining I mean? Or do you just puke it into a bowl?”

  It seemed to me that the fleece blanket moved when this business about the lining of the esophagus was mentioned. Or that a sound came from under it, but I guess this was just my imagination. Everything seemed to move a little, like when you are a kid and have been twirling around.

  My father had a fair amount of life insurance and some money put away in a retirement fund. The house was almost paid for, and he had a pension, too, that my mother would be able to collect. He figured he owed it to her, anyway. He had made a will that was up to date. He had seen Jackie Crandall, his lawyer, and there were no loose ends. In fact, it was the perfectly tidy manner in which an orderly man would leave his affairs. He was not vain about it, but matter of fact, as though these things were items in a well-packed bag. That was that.