She is a patron of the arts; how quickly she became a patron of the sciences. Could George really have left? No. A mix-up. When Dr. Orlow appears, he will help and she will try to seem grateful. Am I grateful? she wonders. Someone must have been rejected from the trial—or worse, their acceptance revoked—so she could take the vacant spot. Who was it? A woman? A blur knocking against the closed window of her conscience like a moth. A woman of her own general age and appearance, a woman losing or soon to lose autonomic function—the inevitability CeCe fears most. Inevitable, unless the Astrasyne does what they hope. This woman, a brumous silhouette, but not a ghost. More like her own bent shadow gliding ahead of her on the pavement. It could have been a man. She hopes it was a man, and one of no redeeming quality. She will gather herself. She must stay.
“Knock-knock?” A nurse bustles into her room—the same woman from the day before, Janet or Jean. Another woman enters, puts down a tray of English muffins and eggs, and leaves. Try to seem grateful! She smiles at the nurse, who begins listing the morning cocktail of pills. Her kingdom, the shadow’s, for the cocktail. Each time she hears the word, CeCe cloaks it in the same tired pun: rocks, sherry, twist, eau-de-vie? She must be pleasant, until someone of greater authority can be procured.
“You’re funny, Mrs. Somner. We’ll pretend we’re having drinks! Just these six, a stroll in the park. Let’s go big to small. Water first. Or, should I say, shooter first, and here’s your lemon, and here’s your salt. Bottoms up.”
“Shooter?” CeCe says, remembering her dream, “What’s a shooter?”
She swallows the pills. As she does, the nurse explains the rule and order dictated by each one and reminds her that the afternoon nurse will administer more. CeCe will take these separately and these together. These on an empty stomach and these with food. Why do they bother telling her when she’s not allowed to administer the doses herself? Under normal circumstances she doesn’t abide being managed. But she wouldn’t trust herself with this alchemy. This is why I smile at the nurse, she thinks, smiling at the nurse.
“How about meeting some of the other residents today?” the nurse says. “I can take you around. They’re asking after you, isn’t that nice? It’s a good group. Mr. Townsend and Dotty—Mrs. Burden—told me to tell you they’re planning a special activity for this evening. Songs at the piano.”
As she speaks, the nurse fluffs the bouquet of yellow tulips that appeared the day before, sent by Patricia. The nurse collects the fallen petals into her fists and slips them into her pocket. “I’ve got time to introduce you around,” she continues, moving toward the closet, into which CeCe had spent the better part of twenty minutes pushing the wheelchair. “How about it?”
CeCe waits—for some serene largess to fill her spirit, but this Dotty, whom she is already sure she should avoid, this Dotty’s name has cluttered her mind. She imagines Dotty smiling from the crinkled pillow with a dreary, dearie bed wisdom, accepting each pill with a darting pink eye.
“I’m indisposed,” CeCe says. “I’m expecting my son. And my daughter.”
A lie. She’s not expecting her daughter. Patricia—Seattle one-half the year, Rio the other, a senior Web producer for an urban-planning group specializing in the protection and modernization of favelas. With the woman, her wife, Lotta, Lotta the famous architect, six-foot Lotta wearing sneakers and a diver’s watch. Patricia is pregnant and will come to visit on her own time, or not at all. She was surprised Pat called so early in the pregnancy—twelve weeks along now—and while their conversation was short and strenuously cheerful, it gave CeCe more hope than she’s had in years. Their fight, over a decade gone, was nonsense, ostensibly about CeCe’s moving out of New York after 9/11, retreating to Stockport, filling two unused spaces in the garage with pallets of Evian. Pat, stalking out the front door, calling CeCe a coward and a limousine liberal. CeCe, waving furiously in the direction of the garage, shouting, “There’s no limousine in there, you simple-minded—it’s water!” The true, unspoken fight being about CeCe’s disparagement of Pat’s then-girlfriend, particularly her lip-pierce, and CeCe’s suggestion that Pat was dating women to get attention and to be special, as she hadn’t yet found any other way to be special. That was the unkind phrase she’d used. Maybe even this wasn’t the true quarrel, but something without incident or word. Prideful, Pat. Like herself in this respect. It spun away from them and in the end they’d said too much to forget but not enough to continue. Pat and Lotta, together five years, but Lotta, too busy for George’s wedding, apparently—CeCe has only seen her in pictures.
Along with the tulips, Pat has sent a stuffed sheep wearing an old-fashioned wimple that she must have ordered from the Internet. The sheep stands on the dresser among the petals that have already fallen since the nurse tidied up, as if in its own small field. There’s something indecent—she hates its fuzzy face. She doesn’t want to be introduced to anyone, even a Dotty, under such circumstances. A toy, flowers—pain is felt only when pain is felt! Unlike fear, or lust, or sadness, which a person can borrow, which in health she’d borrowed from the arts—happily, without consequence. In the old days, she’d screened movies in the pool house. The projector at one end of the pool, the screen at the other, the light beaming over the water in a thick moated shaft. The lapping, upside-down reflection of the film in the turquoise deep-end, the ladies clustered along the tile edge of the pool, holding their glasses at the stems—no one hosted better. No one, Nan said once, kissing her goodbye, her bark of a laugh, except Truman. CeCe couldn’t argue with that.
“Nurse,” CeCe says. “Could I have the bed shifted? Or could we have someone move that sheep?”
“Back hurts? That’s new for you or a regular thing?”
“Not my back, the sheep.”
“Isn’t that cute? Look at his hat. He’s here to watch after you when I’m not around. What a nice gift.”
The nurse snakes her arm behind CeCe’s shoulders and heaves her in an expert, cursory embrace. CeCe finds her face pressed into the woman’s cleavage. It smells like spearmint and tobacco. The nurse wedges a pillow into the vexed hollow between the sheet and her spine. The pillow causes an unnatural arch in her back. The angle affords her an improved view of the sheep.
“I’d like to rest.” CeCe closes her eyes, trading the room for darkness. “In the meantime, could you see that someone gets hold of my son?”
No answer, but she feels—her wrist lifted at the pulse. The audacity! She won’t open her eyes until this woman’s gone. She hears the nurse counting under her breath, then calling to someone in the hallway.
“Yes, she’s good … No, can you get me a Diet Coke?”
With her eyes still closed CeCe says, “Don’t call me she. It’s rude. Pronouns are for the absent. I’m right here.”
This is no place to be. She can’t stay. She’ll stay. The drug will work. She’ll not fade at home, shrink the house she loves to a few rooms. Spoil it with a bed put on the first floor and guardrails along the walls and a plastic stand-up tub with a low plastic gate swinging like a pigpen’s, with guest rooms turned into nurses’ rooms as the private-care consultant, six months before, had diagrammed in lusty red ink over the blue floor plan of her home. Mrs. Baker had recommended the consultant, had used him at her father’s place.
“That house,” CeCe had said to George, “is taken over by girls dressed as nurses, trying to get their visas! I don’t blame them but I don’t want them.” She suspected these girls handled Mr. Baker rough or kind as they chose, emboldened by their own private histories, more epic than the epic of his illness. Nor will she have her society visited upon her, peering in at how she and the house have shrunk—sutured, shuttered. She doesn’t want her people to see her like this. She’ll recover in private and return to resume her full life as if she’d never left.
She turns away from the nurse and opens her eyes to the curtains billowing in the open French doors, the bright morning between the curtains, a flip-book—green grass, a man cutt
ing the hedge bordering the lake. The landscaper, wearing overalls and slick with sweat, working the shears. A bit close to the window! Tufts of vegetation fly. She hears the grind of a chain saw in the trees across the lake. There must be a crew. By the interval work of the saw, she imagines the tree’s rings tell back three hundred years. A blimp hangs above the treetops. The lake is smooth and bright—a fine view, no one lied about that. But how can it be that pain has brought her here?
The nurse is petting her arm. “Hey, now. Let’s get you dressed.”
“I am dressed.” She gestures with exasperation to her outfit, one she’d carefully planned—a silk pantsuit, taupe with a green stripe, unstructured but chic, with a tie at the collarbone. In this context, however, expensive as it is, she sees how it might be mistaken for pajamas. “If you thought I wasn’t dressed, why on earth did you open the curtains? Pull them shut!”
The man in overalls stops his work and glances up, incurious. To him she is a neck corkscrewed into a pillow. He nods, maybe to her, maybe to himself, and turns back to his work. “Pull the curtain,” she says again. “And go!”
The nurse draws in her breath. CeCe remembers herself and adds, “Aren’t you a dear. I should have said please. I should have said thank you. Thank you for coming. A pleasure. Do come again. Now I’d like to change clothes alone. Fetch me anything, no—the green one; there, and the jewelry from the top drawer. Allow an old lady a point of pride. Yes, that’s a good girl.”
“Make sure to eat,” the nurse says, nodding toward the tray, and leaves.
Cece turns her attention to the tray. Has she ever before laid eyes on such a terrible breakfast? Muffins made a million at a time, probably by pistons! Eggs, scrambled to jelly. George will call. She would like one of the breakfasts of her youth, brought up to her as it was each morning on a tray, through the cavernous, clicking lobby of this or that hotel when she accompanied her father on business, those summers before school and before he remarried. After John Stepney’s death, her father took over the company, and by the time she was born he’d bought and sold scores of rubber plantations, by then in South Asia—over port, under ivory, in the backseats of embassy cars. Before her enrollment at Miss Porter’s, he’d dragged her all across the map, though most winters she remained in New York City with the staff. The traveling months provided few objects of comfort or permanence, a reason, perhaps, she grew into an adult with convictions about routine. Such as: breakfast should consist of runny eggs poached with vinegar, butter pastry, chocolate in a silver pot. Where else but on a tray arranged by invisible hands does one find and acquire a taste for the tasteless kiwi? All her life, until today, she’s begun her mornings more or less thus.
Her father. She misses and hardly remembers her father. Georgie had taken the helm as John Stepney became ill. At least John’s death, the family maintained, spared him the pain of witnessing his business erode as his son adjusted haltingly to responsibility, and as the economy buckled: the Amazonian rubber market began its collapse in 1912. Georgie and his brothers neglected the plantations—empty jungle, ghost shelters, overgrown tracks. The tens and the twenties of the new century, they enjoyed a gentleman’s business, content with the diminished Amazon-based company and the Connecticut processing factories. Georgie was a playboy, a buyer of fantastical properties, a commissioner of musical reviews, a collector of actresses at the Barrow Street Playhouse, famous for his charm, his bootlegged parties, his brokering of unusual alliances, his generosity to politicians on all sides, the ruined women in his wake. But saner than his brothers. The Somners had mostly left the game by the rubber-market spike of the First World War. Oldsmobile and Ford contracted to other manufacturers. Georgie did eventually get into the manufacture of sneakers, a new kind of footwear that wasn’t catching on. He never told her what focused his ambition, but in the decade preceding the Second War, Georgie shifted from South America to South Asia—importing rubber from Malaysia and Sri Lanka for processing in Naugatuck. (Rubber, natural rubber, had long before left South America in the coat of a man named Wickham, who smuggled the seeds of the tree to England. Soon the tree grew in Malaysia, in Africa, and every other tropical destination England controlled or could broker with.)
Then, the Second War. The war needed rubber wheels to roll on. Rubber for the bandage companies, rubber for the hospitals, rubber for the boot makers, and rubber for the planes. When the Japanese threatened the Pacific theater, along with all its rubber trees, the Somners’ dormant Brazilian plantations became vital to the effort. Georgie remanned them. At the same time, in Naugatuck, Somner Chemical collaborated in the government’s initiatives for the better development of synthetic rubber, so that issues of territory might never again jeopardize U.S. production.
This is why there must be some mistake, her, stuck in this room. Another mistake—the nurse neglected to pull the curtain before she made her escape, and the man’s still working outside. She can hear the snip of his shears. She won’t change out of her suit after all.
The chain saw cuts off. Maybe she really will try to rest, now that the racket’s stopped, now that the dresser is clear of petals, now that she’s decided she won’t touch the tray, will never eat from such a tray. She’ll see what they do for lunch.
10
At the sight of the door swinging open, Iris’s heart leaps. She’s missed George! She didn’t know how much, until this instant. She throws her arms around him. She gives him a multitude of indiscriminate kisses—side of mouth, eyelid, underside of chin, side of the head, each trailing an exclamation as if he’s returned from some distant expedition. “It’s you! What the hell! You handsome dummy! Why are you here?”
“Oh, my, God,” he says, dropping his bag and shrugging his crumpled linen jacket to the floor. “My poor mother. I’ve never felt so tested, been asked— Victor, how are you? Didn’t see you there. Sorry to interrupt. Good to see you. Don’t you look well.”
How kind George is, even when he’s exhausted and probably wanted to come home to her alone. Helping his mother, asking after Victor. Always putting other people’s cares above his own. Abruptly and formally, she steps back and shakes his hand. They all laugh. Away only a few days and he’s new to her again—how well made he always looks, his easy, strong-shouldered grace, the color in his cheeks, his features firm and lively. She loves how his sharp green squint suggests something rude or reckless meant only for her. How he runs his hands through his flop of hair, how she should remind him to get a haircut, but not to let them cut it short. She even likes the slack way he tossed his jacket down, the way he takes over the room. He picks the jacket up and folds it over the back of the chair. It is the same one he’d handed her to check at the golf club. These things—the chair, the jacket—belonging to her more as time goes on. She loves how he shifts his weight, his gaze dashing from her to Victor with a look like guilt, like the anxious kid he says he was: so respectful of rules he spent his childhood certain he’d just broken one. She can see he had a hard time at Oak Park. Only as good a person as George. Once he told her that if suffering is the precondition for sympathy, and sympathy is the precondition for love, then love required the continued suffering of the loved one. She wasn’t sure she understood. She’d poked him in the ribs and said, “Smart garbage, Dr. Professor,” but thought about it for days. It was smart, but too smart to be true, and neither of them could possibly believe it. He told her it was only with her that he’s been able to cast off the world. Honest to a fault. She loves that he always looks the same, always like himself.
“But, George,” she says, “where are your shoes?”
“Ah,” says Victor, “they were so in love, the sky stuck to them. Now what’s that from?” He’s rolling up the blue leash, hooking his travel mug to his belt, tucking the gold chain under his shirt. “I’m well, thank you, George.”
“I hope you are! If a man of the country like you isn’t well, we’re all in trouble!” George cries, crossing the room to slap Victor on the back. Something abou
t this is unlike George, she thinks. CeCe must have put him through the ringer.
“I hope we are all well,” George continues. “The kind of trial I just endured reminds a person—”
“‘A man of the country’?” Victor asks.
“You know, so skilled with the dog, and the hiking and exercising and being so handy and capable and, for example, this arm”—George thumps Victor’s arm—“rugged as barbed wire, not babysitting a desk like me, not babysitting, what?—ideas. No, you’ve a certain rusticity I wouldn’t even aspire to.”
“A what? What did you say?” Iris asks, looking not at George but to Victor, who turns sharply at the word.
A look passes between them. What are they saying? They are conferring without any need for language, like twins, or house cats. George suspects her—not of adultery, no, certainly not, probably not, but of having a bond with this man that he can’t guess. “Believe me, it’s a compliment. I’m jealous of guys like you. Keeping it simple. Balance and all.”
Victor presses his lips together, but George is certain he is saying something important, getting to a truth overlooked. “Needing so little, none of this plastic feel-better we allow to pile up around us.” He waves in the general direction of the large, chrome espresso maker he recently put on the AmEx, a delightful machine that reminds him of a Victorian train. “When the earth is nothing but fire and garbage and drought, it will be people like me relying on people like you for our survival! And I bet no one had to teach you the things you know. I bet you just know them. I bet you could survive out of doors for a week without help. I bet you were born with all the wisdom and courage you ever needed. And good on you.”
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 9