“Jean should be here any minute to help you get oriented,” Dr. Orlow says. “I think you’ll like her. Amazing transformation of the room. You’ve raised the bar.”
“Looks nice, doesn’t it, Mother?”
Her eye falls on a framed photo of herself from a 1981 issue of Town & Country. Did she ask for that one? Likely not! Will they think she’s the kind of pathological person who likes to gaze upon photos of herself? Then she remembers. Everyone is that sort of person now. In the photo, she wears a jade silk skirt suit and is smiling, leaning against a tree in a small Alphabet City park her dollars had restored. The cover text had read, “A Woman of Uncommon Energy.” Nor had she asked for the photo beside that one! If the decorator’s made one mistake, two, what else has been misplaced? This photo is eight, maybe nine years before the Town & Country shot: she’s boarding a private plane, up the glinting steps on the tarmac, baby George in her arms. She’s turned back in front of the open door to have the picture taken. Patricia is hiding behind her skirt, her arms wrapped around CeCe’s waist, a red-yarn bow and a pigtail. Hawaii, but who took the picture? Not Walter. Walter, already inside. His leg is there in the photo, jutting out onto the carpet, as he was seated. It is a beautiful photo, joy in her face, her eye to the camera, but his wicked leg ruins it. The plane, on loan from a friend. Walter ignored her once they were introduced to the only other passenger in the otherwise empty private terminal—that year’s Miss America, a girl from Wisconsin on a press stop with Holiday magazine. CeCe made sure they weren’t photographed side by side. As they were escorted across the runway, Walter called CeCe Fatty Dolores. He pinched her arm in front of Miss America and the children. (He’d taken to calling her Fatty Dolores the year she had a producer’s credit on a musical version of Lolita she’d thought was brave. Fatty because she’d been pregnant with George when the show closed. Dolores because Walter was so many years her senior. There was nothing, when she met him, to suggest what lay ahead.)
“Yes,” she says to George, “the room is fine.” She tries her best to look pleased. “Although I don’t like how the photos have been arranged. And I don’t like anything else.”
“Adjustments take a while,” Dr. Orlow says. “I’ll leave you to it. Do you have any more questions, for the time being?”
Through the initial visits to the hospital, CeCe prided herself on accommodating each bit of bad news with ladylike discretion, even cheer. No need to make the doctors feel bad, to make things messy. Yes, she bullied the help for a bit of relief. She complained about the food, the spongy pillows, the fussy bedside manner, and the yoga pants worn by the new wife. She told George the nurses were stealing money from her purse. She told the nurses Iris was stealing money from her purse. The nurses were not seen again. What better fun, she asked George, once it was all straightened out, are nurses and children for? She would not apologize; there wasn’t much else she was able to do to keep her spirits up. But entering this room, she is overcome—never until today has she noticed that all her furniture, all inherited, is decorated with a leaf or a flower or an animal. That it’s all of a woodland theme. She feels her hands reaching up to her mouth, she finds her mouth is open.
“Forest,” she says to George, meaning also to say motif, and something against the decorator, for she doesn’t know what kind of chairs and tables she would have chosen for herself, had she chosen for herself, and now she will not ever. She reaches up and throws her fist into her son’s lapel. The linen absorbs the impact with an unimpressive whump. She notices Dr. Orlow has halted mid-departure and that a woman is in the room, in some kind of nurse’s costume; Jean, here to orient her, presumably. George’s gaze unfocuses to the ceiling, as it had when she would scold him as a boy. Weakling, she thinks, unclear as to whether she means him or herself. She seizes his chin and pulls his bright green eye down to hers and tells him it is time to go home, now, now, now, incanted as calmly as any witch would lay a curse. She wheels her way out of the room.
“I’ll get her,” George says, but before he moves to follow, he is mesmerized by the look of her hands on the light gray rubber. He has never seen her touch a wheel of any kind. They find her down the corridor, inside a supply closet. The shelves are stacked with plastic bins. She has almost managed to close the door. She is sitting in the dark.
5
Iris and the dog lift their faces out of half sleep toward the sound. A door downstairs being opened, pulling her out of the well of a nightmare and back into the bedroom. It’s almost eleven. 3D springs clumsily off the bed, whimpers by the closed bedroom door. She falls back. George as a boy—nine, maybe ten—this is what she is dreaming. A sunny road runs along the ruin of a stone wall, winding the loamy fields as far as she can see. She is following the squirrel from one of her band posters—peepholes for eyes, cherries for guts. They come to a column supply truck overturned in the road, abandoned so long milkweed and goldenrod climb its wheel. Medical supplies spill out the back, glinting metal. The tattered canvas, its faded red cross, flaps in the breeze. George is slumped against the wall, legs splayed in the dry dirt, head bent over his little blade of a chest. The squirrel leaps the wall and pauses behind George’s ear. In the air is the slow play of dandelion. She should stay with George, but the squirrel is continuing up the road in the direction of—a church? A church, though only the facade stands, a jagged mason tooth and a missing eye, light shot through the socket, light in the rubble of the nave behind—tongue gone, gone the interior castle. The mask of a church—not a church. Suddenly she understands. Bombed. The black of planes has already come. If the planes have come once, they will come again. She calls to little George to move, to find cover. She knows the lie! When they draw the maps, they do not include the shadows of the planes. George lifts his head. Come, please come! she cries. He will not stand. She sees his eye is canceled too. He points his chin at her and laughs. I did it, Mama, he says. It was me.
She’s sweated through the sheet. Back in the morning light, unbidden she remembers Carol’s face as it looked in the last days, skull-out, in Oswego. Her dream—what was it? A piece of her grandfather’s story of the Battle for Brittany, maybe, a story Carol relayed only at the end, carried to Iris down a dark hall in the long, translucent hands of dementia.
“Lo? Hello? Iris?”
The jangling of keys, a sound so ordinary it must be real.
She cracks the bedroom door. Victor, here to walk 3D, is letting himself in through the back, the mudroom. He bangs his keys onto the marble kitchen island, stomps his sneakers. 3D barrels down the stairs.
“Mutt-friend,” she hears, “devil-dog, hey!”
Victor bends on one knee by the breakfast counter. The blue leash hangs slack against his leg. From the top of the stairs, she sees he is having a serious conversation with the dog. Her work schedule is still unpredictable; she never knows when she’ll be around for the midmorning walk.
“I don’t believe it. 3D, you are telling me this is happening in the park? Go on. And you went over to them and they—Lhasa apsos? Yes, it is a stupid name. The nerve. To be iced by the likes of them. No wonder you’re feeling low. Now, don’t you take it to heart. Mutts are the very best, and you are the very best of the mutts.” The dog’s muzzle rests in Victor’s open palm.
“Who first,” Victor calls up the stairs, “you or the dog?”
In the mirror she sees the disassembly of sleep.
“3D, please! I’m a mess. I need coffee. You need coffee?”
“Had mine,” he calls, thumping his thermos on the counter. “Come on, dear dog, we’re going for a walk.”
She dresses and puts the coffee on and watches them amble down the sloped back lawn. They stop where the edge of the woods meets the grass, a crooked stick hanging from the mouth of the dog, a tennis ball in the dog walker’s hand. He looks up and catches her at the glass wall and waves. She likes his face: wide-awake eyes set between round cheeks and Elvis sideburns, under short, black hair. Because of all the exercising and showeri
ng, he always appears air-fluffed and squeakily scrubbed. He’s her age, but in the habit of peering all around him with a generous interest that makes him appear younger. A scar cuts a streak out of one of his eyebrows. His skin’s a warm bronze, deepened with outdoor activity. What are you? she’d asked one afternoon when they were drinking beers by the pool. I’m everything, he answered, frowning at the question. India and Africa by way of Trinidad, Belarus through upstate New York, Philippines out of Los Angeles, Sicily via the Bronx. What are you? Eh, she said. Canada, France. Jersey. Acadian. A bowl of snow.
He disappears into the trees after 3D. The odd thought comes to her that the curved edge of the lawn is the rim of an eye, the dark swimming pool is its center. An eye without a reflection, without—the word for the middle of the eye. Your own name, stupid, she thinks. She isn’t all awake. Idle makes idle, her mother would have said, and been right. Now that she hardly works, so many hours must glide over her to make a day. Once, when she was little, behind her mother’s back her old aunties gave her an orange plastic record player and a set of twelve-inch vinyl records, the abridged audio of several of Disney’s animated films. Every night she’d play one and fall asleep clutching the cardboard sleeve of the record—Cinderella, Snow White. All the same, a virtuous girl who sings a song. She never thought what happened after the end, the marriage. In the fairy tales there were two ways: off the wedding page to a blurry but total happiness, or left behind to rot into the ragged crone of the next story, her itchy heart ticktocking away in the dusty sharkbox of her chest. No, Iris doesn’t miss her years alone. But her life before George felt more vital in its loneliness than this kind of day. Why George fell in love with her she doesn’t know, though she doesn’t doubt him. Last week, they shared a grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich in the grass under the ash tree. George fell asleep with a magazine on his face and her hand on his chest. The dog woke them, late in the afternoon, nudging them with his nose. Even with this—happiness—when she doesn’t have any properties to show, there isn’t much to keep her from staying in bed, heavy as death.
The coffeemaker wheezes full. She gets a cup and returns to the window. By now, Victor and the dog will be in the meadow dotted with blue-eyed Marys. There’s the sound of the cicada and the sun tangled across her forearms resting on the table. Dragonflies skim the top of the pool—how is an hour gone already? 3D gallops out of the woods, the light on his red back and on Victor, lifting his sneakers high out of the grass. The tennis ball flies from Victor’s hand. 3D bursts forward, the stick dropping from his mouth. Next time she’ll go with them.
* * *
“You ready now?” Victor says, nodding toward the empty cup in the sink. 3D pants around and collapses on his mat, his legs caked in mud. He’s protecting something under his paws.
“He’s destroyed it. You’ll see.” Victor gently extracts 3D’s bounty. The stick, chewed to pulp.
When Iris asked around town, Victor’s was the first name given. All his services were praised: personal training, certified massage, dog walking, meal preparation, hairdressing, property maintenance. She hired him Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for the first three services, as she likes the daily ritual of cooking and has no interest in hair. There’s already a gardener, a woman named Fay, who appeared the week they moved to Somner’s Rest, in a blue chambray button-down and red lipstick. Sent by CeCe, who’d said of Iris, “She isn’t a gardener, she’s a bartender!” Fay and her fleet of assistants had spread out over the lawn like a search-and-rescue team, installing minimalist, low-maintenance clumps of shrubbery and grasses that hardly needed tending.
“Have you seen the pile of sticks 3D’s made under the tree out front?”
“He’s a problem hoarder,” Victor says.
She laughs. 3D tips onto his back, exposing the buttercup swirl in his armpits. “He isn’t much for pride.” Victor nods. “Exactly what I’ve been discussing with him all morning.”
She excuses herself and returns wrapped in a sheet. Victor sets up the massage table. She hops up and closes her eyes. She becomes aware of the starlings singing in the rustling leaves at the window, a car passing in the distance, 3D’s blubbery sigh. Victor is causing pain to her shoulder she trusts is therapeutic. She tells herself quiet between friends is good. A sign they are real friends, not afraid to be peaceful together.
“Don’t your hands get tired?”
“In the beginning, but not anymore.” He lifts her left leg and shakes it.
“Did you hear the rain last night? You saved me from the worst dream.”
“Supposed to rain all week.” His thumbs jam into her spine, but he doesn’t ask about her dream.
“Rain makes me miss smoking,” she ventures, with a sigh.
“Smoking’s the best. After-rain smoking is the best of the best. It’s the humidity in the tobacco. You never heard me say that. I’m a trainer. But we have our memories. When did you quit?”
“Right before I met George. More or less.”
“Convenient.” He pounds the back of her thigh.
“George’s mother’s probably keeps me from picking it back up. The look she’d give me.”
“Scared by the in-laws.”
“What do you know from in-laws?”
“I had a wife,” he says, surprising her, working the back of her neck. “Isabel. But I never got to know her family. New Zealand, too far. You liking the Davis? Keeping you off the streets?”
“The what?” He’s changing the subject. The book he loaned her, The Bluest Ribbon. She turns and raises her face so it’s not smashed against the table. “I like it okay. Maybe I missed something, but nothing’s actually happening, right? I mean, what’s her name is all—‘I love this one, no I love that one.’ But all she’s doing is sitting on a ship and staring out to sea? Having a rough think? Both guys are basically assholes and they aren’t even on the ship with her? And it’s a two-year voyage? And it seems, I’m not sure, like she might already be dead? Does anything happen?”
“Yeah, something happens.”
“Like, she gets out of her chair and walks over to the other side of the boat?”
“No, no, she has to choose! Dax-Fabian or Piers! What a choice! Or, she doesn’t choose. I see how you almost tricked me there. I’m not telling. Maybe she can’t decide. Then life will decide something for her. That usually doesn’t turn out well.”
Iris doesn’t like The Bluest Ribbon. Every time she wades forward a page, it pushes her back. But is it her fault or the book’s? Then it’s out of her hands—upstairs when she’s down, inside when she’s out. The last time she looked, she hadn’t been able to find it. She’s hardly opened a book the last three years. When Victor pressed this one into her hands, its dreamy cover of a woman looking out over ocean waves dissolving into blue ribbons, she accepted it anxiously and hopefully, as it dared out of memory her old love, the pleasure of other people’s thoughts.
“How about the part where the baby falls over the rail, into the ocean?” Victor asks. “How long does that bassinet take to sink—ten pages! Terrible, didn’t you love it?”
“But that was so upsetting!”
“It’s a book. The more upsetting the better.”
Instantly she knows it’s true, but why she can’t quite grasp. The way he says it makes it sound like something everybody knows. She’d felt it in the dark lecture hall as she listened to the professor in her square of light, but she’d never had the words for how something that was upsetting doubled back and became something else, how this seemed to be what people called art. When she first got to know George, she imagined they’d have conversations about ideas the way the undergraduates did, that their kind of talk, broad and deep and open-ended, was the prize of every college degree, that the door to George’s apartment in Washington Square would be another door into this kind of life. But George was happy talking of nothing beyond the chalk outline of their day. He owns and seems to have read a lot of books. But she’s only seen him read the news, or a
bout opera. When he does begin a book, she soon finds him asleep. And his music—this belongs to him alone. Maybe his apartment should have tipped her off—a cool, professionally decorated bachelor’s co-op with buttoned-black-leather-and-steel-framed seating, untouched gym equipment, solar blinds, a pointy blue-glass sculpture by the door, a massive opera-churning stereo system, and a trio of black-slashed prints—Franz Kline, she learned—and the hunter-green bedding a surprising number of straight men, when shopping alone, thought was the only color they were allowed to buy. But she said to herself, some people just don’t know how to make a place nice. She grew busy with early love, and later with what it meant to become a Somner, and forgot that his lack of curiosity had disappointed her; later still, when she was reminded of it, she scuffed it away again, best she could. When Victor gave her the book, she was surprised. She didn’t think he was the reading type. She didn’t think he thought she was the reading type.
“We need books,” Victor says now, “because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.”
“That’s beautiful.” But how, she wants to ask, can books be good friends and good when they are upsetting? Who wants upsetting friends?
“Tell me that scene right after they get off the ship and she’s all ‘Where’s my hat!’ didn’t kill you. And when—”
“Stop, I haven’t read that far! Victor, I might have lost it. I’m so sorry! If I can’t find it, I’ll get you a new one. I want to finish it.”
“You’ve been feeling guilty this whole time? It’s only a book. Put it out of your head. Hey, I saw the Vargas place is up for sale. Great house. You doing that one?”
“Our agency, but not my listing. I’m all condos. I’m up to my elbows in condos. Or, I will be in a month or so. They’re setting me up on a development. But I’m part-time. I help the other agents, mostly. Which is, whatever. You’re being nice by changing the subject.”
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 5