“3D, stay,” she said to the big red dog she’d just adopted, against all reason, no life to keep a dog. The housemate was one of those kids left on campus who didn’t have anyplace to go and had stayed to work off his loan. He had spiked black hair, heaped shoulders, a worn black Slayer T, a studded belt to which his pocketed wallet was attached by a chain, no ass, bare yellow feet, giant headphones around his neck, stubble and acne competing for real estate on his chin. A style that made more sense in cooler weather. He leaned in the doorway. She with her wet hair, in her mint-green golf-club uniform.
“Glad I cleaned,” he said, and opened the door wider for her to enter. A baseball game was on TV. He lifted a bowl of rainbow cereal and a heaping ashtray from the couch and pushed aside a paper plate. She’d missed the house, the house she’d slept in many times.
“Hang on.” He disappeared into a bedroom. “You should say hi to the girls.” Iris muted the game and listened. No one else was home. She smelled weed and incense. The roommate returned with a mangy ferret wiggling under each arm.
“Pretty as ever, aren’t they? You want some?”
She shrugged, sure. He handed her the slinking ferrets and rustled his pocket for the joint. She let them squirm off her lap and ooze under the couch. It was strong weed. She and the roommate forgot each other awhile, he watching the game on mute, she watching the poster on the wall behind the TV, its title and artist’s name in large fascinating letters across the bottom: WATER LILIES CLAUDE MONET.
“I can tell you miss him,” the roommate said abruptly. “But he’s not an interesting guy. I’m not being a dick. It’s just true. Just because the pool’s got a diving board don’t mean it’s got a deep end. You want a beer?” He pulled two tall cans from the minifridge at the side of the couch. “Nice, right?” He patted the fridge, thoughtfully draped with a faded Tibetan flag, topped with a stuffed gorilla and a tray of sand containing a tiny rake.
“Can you tell me, have you talked to him?”
“I haven’t—Iris! Shitting outside the cage.” He laughed and pulled the smaller ferret into his hands. “He named her after you, kind of. I couldn’t think of a name, and he was talking about you, and I said, that’s fucking fantastic, it’s totally an unpet name. Like Paul is an unpet name. Like com’eer, Paul, what? It doesn’t make any sense on a pet. Missing the C-factor. You been swimming? You look all swimmy. You into this baseball? You like movies? I could change it to a movie.”
He knelt and fiddled with the pile of DVDs. She had ten, twelve years on him. Like a knife at her neck, remembering that, though it could have been the claws of a ferret, out from under the couch to thrust its sock length into her hair. She was thirty-one.
The housemate held out his finger, covered in peanut butter. A ferret leaped to it.
“Not that you don’t have the C-factor.”
She put down her beer. “Sure, what’s the C-factor?”
“Cuteness.”
“Get this one off me.” She, stood to go, swiping at the animal still clinging to her neck.
“Don’t worry. That’s not Iris. That would be one phenomenological mind fuck, am I right? That one’s Earl. Earl’s a girl!” This killed him. He bent over, laughing.
“Ah.” She shook Earl to the couch. The roommate followed her to the door and scrounged around for paper and a pen and handed her his phone number, which was only four digits, his campus extension, he knew she knew the system, the prefix. He wrote Norefills, which she guessed was his instant-message name. He snatched it back and added his cell.
“In case you want to call me. Hot costume,” he added, looking at her uniform. “Like out of an old movie. You’re very statuesque.”
She whistled to 3D, who at the smell of the ferrets had abandoned his post in front of the house and was pacing under the open living-room window. She got in her car, and for a minute she looked out at the house. She wiped her face and made it on time to her shift at the golf club.
Now she heads away from the landscapers, toward the bright garden. Everything, and also not much, has changed. Still being put out to wander, like a big gangly cat. Her thoughts are interrupted by—a rock, hitting the soft dirt between her feet. Another bounces hard off her ankle.
“Hey!” she shouts. The boys have followed her to the tree line.
Behind them, a ways away, the sleeping man shifts.
“We’ll be seeing you around.” The older boy laughs. “Literally.”
“What’s going on?” their boss says, stirring awake, the pole saw falling to the ground.
“Nice afternoon,” she calls to him. Rotten as they are, she’d rather let the kids be. “Nice and cool.” She heads quickly out into the sunlight. To rejoin her husband and her mother-in-law, to see if she can’t convince them to drive somewhere for lunch.
26
He can’t get it right. He can’t understand—everything’s ruined. He paces the tasteful and unremarkable lobby, waiting for Iris to return from wherever she’s got off to. No, he’ll figure it out. If only he could think. Or, think one thought at a time. His heart, thumping. Fine. He doesn’t need a thing from his mother. He never has! He was doing her a courtesy. Risking his well-being by sharing his life, trying to be the good son. By giving her the first opportunity, moreover, at a worthy investment. How many two-bit theater programs has the Somner Fund supported over the years? How many stages has his mother already lit? This is exactly why he made it a rule never to count on her for anything. How had he forgotten? As soon as he asks—she thinks of no one but herself! It pleases her to watch him fail. As if he were his father, as if he were to blame for who his father was and to be kept under thumb as his father was, how callow, how obvious, for her to be exercising her bitterness on him, all these years! She doesn’t want to see him succeed. She’s the only one allowed any kind of reputation, any attention. He’ll leave her, like Walter, is what she thinks. Has he left her yet? Is there no reward for a lifetime of loyalty and sacrifice? Where trust? Where faith? If he has a child, he will never be so mean. He’d never put his wishes and his disappointments on a child. A poor little child! He doesn’t have it in him. He’d let it be its own wondrous creature. He would—he realizes with a pleasant thrill, the first bright thought in the polluted roil of the last hour—his child would be extraordinary. A young master at the piano, maybe, a composer maybe, and one day they’d write something together and the world would hold its breath. Or maybe the child would become something he can’t envision, something all his or her own, and that would be okay too. He’s no tyrant. He’d let the child be!
After his mother had ejected him from her room—“Tell Esme to send the ormolu” were her parting words—he stood desolately in the hall outside the closed door, calling Iris’s cell. No answer. He called it again as he thrust himself through the automatic glass front doors of the lobby. He stormed past the lake into the garden as it rang, threw himself against a tall and well-clipped shrub in deepest agony, called again, forcibly parted a clot of sunflowers to scan the other end of the garden, saw no one but a happy old fucker photographing a butterfly, twisted his ankle on a low, obscured stone border, caught his balance on an expired rosebush, emitted a shriek, the sound of which flooded him with embarrassment even though he was alone, and returned to the lobby of the residence no less angry but sweatier, with red palms and ruined bucks.
He’s at a loss for what to do when he hears—women’s voices. Around the corner in the hall. Not his mother, not his wife. He can only reel a word or two out of the murmur. No, he will not go back to his mother’s room and beg. He’ll wait. He bends and touches his toes. Calisthenics. Not a moment wasted! He has to fix this. His entire crew—the orchestra, the singers, tech, production—their salaries will again come due. Such a drag, how he has to keep paying them! He can probably make it to November. He has a little time. December, if he delays the rent on the theater. Where is Iris? He pushes one hand against the other, his elbows out, until he feels a slight, satisfying tingle in his armpit
s. He turns to face the lobby’s only wall decor, an enormous oil painting of, according to the plaque, the founder of Oak Park, then called the College of Physicians of Greater Connecticut, one corpulent and puritanically beaked Dr. Forum, wearing the black, high-collared coat of his era. George begins a series of squats, keeping balance by spotting the doctor’s eye; the doctor might have benefited from some calisthenics himself. First thing he gets home he’ll order a treadmill, or one of those bullshit elliptical trainers that’s easier on the knees. Maybe he’ll hire Victor for some personal training. No, he knows what he’s doing. And he hates Victor! He’ll take up running. Running with the sunrise on the road.
“Are you okay?”
A nurse has padded up to him. She looks alarmed.
“Super!” he cries. “Just biding my time.”
“Are you Mr. Somner?”
“I am.”
“Your mother asked me to give you this. She forgot. I’m her afternoon nurse, most days.”
With her slender hands she puts forward a blank, unsealed envelope. Has his mother reconsidered? Is it a check? He shakes out the folded paper. A list. Clearly made before the visit, written in a moment her hand was steady, in the beautiful, precise, and softly slanted script she’d perfected at the ladies’ junior college she attended before Vassar, a script he’s always grudgingly admired. A list he understands is no longer for him but for Esme to dispatch.
To bring or send
photo of George and Patricia on beach in St. Martin—halfway up the wall 2nd floor kitchen stair
walking boots & winter coat—the red
fox gloves
ormolu from bedroom mantel
Walter’s portrait of me—in storage
the Rathbone
Dragon brooch—at bank
Talbot
the two bergères, if possible to ship
writing desk, ditto
As Soon As Possible.
E-mail. How about e-mail? More convenient, less dramatic! But maybe Esme doesn’t like e-mail, either. Maybe this is a handicap his mother and Esme share, for different reasons. The Talbot—a carved wood dog that stands on the piano. A white, English hunting dog. Ridiculous. The ormolu clock transfixed him as a child: nestled in front of an ancient ladies’ fan from China, the clockface sat in a lump of marble meant to be a rock rising out of the sea, with two marble figures wearing intricate accessories of gold. The myth of Perseus saving Andromeda: marble Andromeda, naked, draped backward over the rock, her head resting above twelve o’clock, her feet and hands bound. Perseus, on the other side of the clock, his sword raised to break Andromeda’s chains. Medusa’s severed head beside his gold-clad foot. George crumples the note, jams it into his pocket, and resumes his calisthenics, palms together. None of these items are necessary.
“I interrupted your prayer. I didn’t realize. Sorry,” the nurse says. She smacks her forehead and crosses herself, so fluidly he wonders if she doesn’t often combine these gestures. He looks down at his hands and suppresses a laugh.
“You have,” he says, giving her a grave look. Why not? He probably should be praying, given the circumstances. “You could pray with me. Nurses and nuns used to be the same, right?”
The nurse glances over at the receptionist.
“This is the first time I’ve prayed,” he whispers, leaning toward her, “since I was a boy.”
She nods and folds her hands together.
He takes his squat down into a kneel and bows his head. I am I am I am, he prays silently. The nurse lowers herself next to him. In a high, timid whisper she says, “We nurse and son pray for the peace and comfort of Cecilia Somner. In your great wisdom may you bless her and allow her swift passage to a bright future that is healed whole. Amen.”
He’s startled by the quick splendor of her speech. “That was beautiful,” he says, looking into the eye of the painted doctor, ashamed to look into hers.
“Thank you. They’ll think we’re praying to the painting.” She smiles, nodding her cashew ponytail toward a security camera he had not noticed, tucked into the corner molding. “I’ll hear about it later, I’m sure!”
“Blame it on me. Tell them I insisted.”
“I’m only kidding,” she says, standing.
“I bet you have a lovely singing voice.” He gazes up at her imploringly. His knees are killing him. His twisted ankle hurts too. He’s not sure why he’s still on the floor. “Can you sing? I’m in the music business, did anyone tell you? I have a pretty good instinct for these things.”
“Back to work for me.”
“Don’t go, I want to”—she looks away as he ungracefully rises to his feet—“to apologize. My mother can be difficult. I appreciate everything the staff is doing here. I want you to know that.”
“Mrs. Somner? She’s easy as pie. Well, after she got adjusted. And now that she’s back from the pneumonia. A hard few weeks, those were.”
“But, it wasn’t serious.”
She is looking at him more carefully than he likes. “It was. She went to ICU and Telemetry. But now she’s doing well. That’s what matters.”
His mother had smelled different, not like fishy coins. Like normal. Like health. He feels the back of his hand at his mouth. The word bankruptcy flies past his vision. The nurse seems far away, at the other end of the shining-resin lobby.
“Her numbers are right back where they were. And her mobility’s improved, I think, and— Are you feeling all right?”
He’s seized by a ferocious desire to touch her nameplate, which says TANIA. He points at it, as if its letters prove him right, though he doesn’t know what he’s right about. “I’m fine.” Mercifully, here is Iris. He throws his arms around her. “You disappeared!”
Iris starts to cry against his shoulder. Dear Iris, crying quietly for him! But how could she know? She doesn’t know anything. The nurse’s eyes widen. She nods and backs around the corner and is gone.
“What’s bringing this on?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“It’s in the car,” Iris snaps, straightening up and wiping her eyes. “I didn’t think we’d be separated.”
“What happened?”
“Some kid threw a rock at me. Never mind.”
“Where? Are you hurt?”
“No. It’s no big deal. Let’s forget it. Are we taking your mother to lunch?”
27
But they were not taking George’s mother to lunch, and George—tugging her down the hall by the hand, his brow furrowed, the receptionist calling after them—didn’t seem to hear Iris’s questions. Had the nurse been telling him bad news? The receptionist’s eye had been on George even as she wiped the dry-erase board on the easel by her station. This caused Iris to succumb to her tears, more than those rinky-dinks outside. George, so spiraled away from himself. Still, it was a relief to cry on his shoulder under the musty and menacing portrait. She’d studied it earlier, while they waited for permission to visit CeCe’s room.
But now they’re sitting in Dr. Orlow’s office, on the interview side of his solid mahogany desk. She hardly knows how they got there. George had pulled her down the hall at such a speed. He’s holding her hand under the desk.
“A rock,” he’s saying. “Thrown at my wife.”
Dr. Orlow is her age, maybe younger. He’s just referred to her as Mrs. Somner. He’s apologizing, leaning his tall frame forward, explaining that he doesn’t know who does the landscaping. He’ll speak to Buildings and Grounds. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.
“Endangered,” George says. “On Oak Park property. Awful! How do you think this makes me feel?”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it as soon as we can.”
“Do you know I twisted my ankle? While I was out searching? For my missing wife? It’s a mess out there. Uneven ground. How about oversight? Well-run places of business are known to keep track of their employees. Check references, even. Believe it or not,
periodically observe and assess the functionality of their staff. I want to speak to the supervising grounds person right away.”
She hears Dr. Orlow say that the landscapers are not employees but contracted; she hears him apologize again and suggest it might not be the best idea, at present, to have the individuals in question join them. He asks her if she might walk through what happened again. She finds herself nodding. She looks down at the corner of the desk as George insists again that the supervisor be brought in. She can’t bear to have George in her sight—how his flinty eyes are widening and narrowing as he leans forward, his free hand balled in the air. She’s surprised when Dr. Orlow relents, makes the phone call, speaks to one person, waits, speaks to another. The receptionist from the lobby enters holding a notebook and a pencil, closes the door quietly behind her, and takes a seat in a corner.
“It was nothing,” Iris says firmly.
“She’s too kind. Tell him how it happened, Iris.”
“We’ll straighten it out,” Dr. Orlow says. “Again, I do hope—”
“You will fire them.” George is squeezing her hand, over and over, hard.
“Hey, what? Don’t.” She is—it’s only because he loves her so much, isn’t it? “Let’s all please hold up a second.”
“My wife.” George stops. He lets go of her hand. “My wife,” he says again, with a slow, gathering calm that’s rare for him of late, that she realizes she’s been missing, but that also reminds her of CeCe, maybe an attitude he’s picked up from being near his mother again. “My wife, Dr. Orlow, is pregnant. Can you imagine what could have happened here? Throwing rocks at a woman. A woman alone. On facility property. I’m amazed this isn’t enough to merit your genuine interest. Here I am forced to share our private business with you, just to make an impression.”
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 22