The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “If you don’t mind having dinner with my mother, that is. She’s staying with us for a few days. Actually I should get going. It’s close to five, Dave’s away, and I’ve left her alone long enough. Okay?”

  “Sure, thanks. How is Evelyn these days?”

  “You’ll see for yourself,” she said curtly.

  Evelyn was asleep in the guest room when we arrived, and I, too, took a nap on the living room couch while Mona went to work her magic spells in the kitchen. Hours must have passed; when I woke the light was waning. I was sitting near the big picture windows gazing out at the river when I heard shuffling steps—Mona coming from the guest room, half pushing, half leading her mother as if she were a large package on a dolly. I had met Evelyn several times over the years, before the Alzheimer’s had set in; she used to sing, I recalled, in amateur theatricals and church choirs. She looked a bit dazed now, but no more so than someone just awakened. She was a slender, olive-skinned woman with hazel eyes and silvery hair stylishly cut. In her light print dress with a wide belt (surely not one of Mona’s acquisitions), her white sandals and rose-painted toenails, she might have been a fashion model for Modern Maturity.

  “It’s Laura, Mom. Remember Laura?”

  “I’m not sure we’ve met.” The hand she offered reluctantly was cool and limp. “Are you Mona’s friend from the flea market?”

  “No, I’m a writer.”

  She sat down beside me and looked out the window. I followed her westward gaze, where the purple light was deepening, with a greenish tinge.

  “Don’t worry if you don’t get a response,” said Mona. “She tunes out a lot these days. Come, dinner’s all ready.”

  At the table beside the window, she had set out a feast of roast chicken with rosemary, green rice and salad. Mona sat at my left, her back to the river and the view, facing Evelyn. She put food on Evelyn’s plate, and every so often Evelyn speared a morsel and brought it absently to her mouth. Meanwhile, the lights across the river gradually came on—a follow-the-dots puzzle—and the lordly Hudson took on a sheen. Beyond it, to the south, glittered a magical little enclave resembling Oz, which Mona informed us was actually Hoboken, New Jersey.

  “If it’s a nice day tomorrow I think we’ll drive out to the country. How would you like that, Mom, an afternoon in the country?”

  “Take me out to the ball game,’” Evelyn sang, and I suppressed a giggle.

  “It’s all right, you can laugh. She doesn’t mind. A little lower, Mom, okay?” Evelyn was belting out, “‘I don’t care if we never get back.’” “How about some iced tea?”

  Evelyn nodded. “‘I’m a little teapot, short and stout,’” she sang. “That’s what you used to sing in school, Mona.” She held the glass quite steadily, I noticed. She might have lost her grip mentally, but things did not leap from her hands as they did from mine. I was being quite careful with my glass and silverware and napkin.

  “‘Here is my handle, here is my spout.’” She did the hand motions just as Jilly used to do.

  Suddenly a streak of color exploded outside and I sat upright to stare toward Hoboken. “Fireworks!” I cried. “It’s fireworks across the river. Look!”

  “Well, well,” said Mona. “Quite a display, isn’t it?”

  Evelyn clapped her hands with delight, then turned to me and smiled. It was a professional show of splendidly cosmic proportions, loud and brilliant, one of the rewards of living in this decaying yet exuberant city. The noise suggested a major battle taking place just out of sight, with the lights its visual expression. The best moments were the suspenseful dark times before the outbursts, the waiting for unimaginable wonders.

  “This is fantastic,” I said. “It must be for July Fourth. But that’s a few days away, isn’t it?”

  “It’s coming from Hoboken. Maybe they’ve been misinformed over in Jersey,” said Mona, swiveling for a brief glance. “So about my little reunion party when Madelyn’s here. . . . I’ll have to start calling people.

  Too bad Quinn isn’t around. We could use someone like that, to hold forth, tell stories.”

  “He’s in town, as a matter of fact, but I think he’ll be gone by then. I just had lunch with him. I forgot to tell you. He was full of stories, yes. Mostly about love. He’s compelled, like the ancient mariner. He thinks love in any form is the most fascinating story.” I didn’t add that I thought so, too. So did Evelyn, apparently.

  “‘Oh, my man, I love him so,’” she sang in a beautiful contralto, “‘he’ll never know. ...”’

  “It never lets up with you two, does it?” said Mona. “It’s like a soap opera where the actors have a lifetime contract. They have to keep writing scenes for them.”

  Outside, a huge purple dandelion erupted over the river, scattering light like seeds. Evelyn grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Isn’t this fantastic?” she said. “It’s better than in the old days. A few things are better than in the old days.”

  “The Chinese invented fireworks,” I said. “They used it at all their great festivals, my Tai Chi teacher once mentioned, to scare off the demons that come out at night.”

  “Is that so?” said Evelyn. “And what happens when the festivals are over? Do the demons come back?”

  “I guess so. I didn’t ask. Actually, I’ve decided that what Q. really is is a flasher,” I told Mona. “Oh, not literally,” I hastened to amend, as Evelyn blinked and sat up straight with a disapproving frown. “Not a weirdo. He’s every inch the gentleman—Laurence Olivier as Hamlet is his idol. A prince of a man. I mean an emotional flasher. He has to give you a quick and shocking peek at who he is and what he looks like underneath. And while no one likes a real flasher, this kind has a certain appeal. To judge from the results, at any rate.”

  “That’s quite good,” Mona remarked, as if I had constructed a minor work of art, as certain conversational gambits are. A scaled-down version of performance art. “Very good, Laura.”

  “Thank you.” We paused for another magnificent shower, blue and yellow petals strewn through the sky. Faintly, in the distance, a fire engine wailed.

  Evelyn, who had been crooning to herself, sang out, ‘He isn’t true, He beats me, too.’”

  “Oh, no.” I turned to face her. “It’s nothing like that. You’ve got the wrong idea.”

  “It’s only a song,” said Evelyn. “Don’t get all worked up. Look, the stars are coming out. What was the rhyme you used to love?” she asked Mona.

  “‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star.’”

  “‘How I wonder where you are,’” said Evelyn.

  “‘Up above the world so high, Like a . . . Like a . . .’?” Mona coaxed.

  “Diamond!” said Evelyn at last. “‘Like a diamond in the sky.’” She rose abruptly and began striding haughtily across the room.

  “Hey, wait, Mom. Where are you going?”

  “I have to make a phone call. What did you think? I’m not totally out of things yet, you know.”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “A friend. Do you mind?” From the back, as she turned into the bedroom, she seemed girlish, the frothy dress fluttering about her slim legs.

  “The reason I asked,” murmured Mona, “is that she’s taken to calling people she hasn’t seen in years, sometimes in the middle of the night, to tell them what she thinks of them.”

  “You’re very patient,” I said. “It’s a wonder you get any work done.”

  “It’s not so difficult yet. When I’m working at home she can stay here with me, and the rest of the time I have people with her in her apartment. No, the worst is to come. Actually I find it easier to talk to her this way. I tell her things I wasn’t able to say before. She was nothing like she is now. Very businesslike. Believe me, I’m more maternal to her than she ever was to me. I don’t know where all the nursery rhymes and getting thrilled over fireworks are coming from. What’s the matter, are you okay?”

  “Just tired. I’ll help you clean up and then I’d better go home.”r />
  “Never mind that. Shall I walk you? It’s a nice night.”

  “Walk? Are you kidding? No, I’ll take a cab. Thanks. I’m sorry to cut this short.”

  As soon as the doctor offered his diagnosis I began feeling sicker, as if official recognition, like election to political office, had granted my virus a license for all sorts of bad behavior.

  A real illness. Not grief or guilt in translation, not urban decay or environmental pollution, witchcraft or the movement of the tides. A man of science ought to know. Don’t let anyone accuse you of malingering, he said.

  Little did he know how much I’d like to malinger, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I keep shuffling to my desk to work on my book, give Ev a better destiny. I leaf through notes or old Town Reports, tinker with a phrase here and there, until my brain short-circuits. Lights out. I sit holding the thin manuscript on my lap like a mother in a famine-struck land with nothing to offer her baby, hoping it will grow from love alone.

  There are a few things I can still do, though, such as buy groceries. The first strategy in the face of danger is to keep to routine. Persist. Flexibility is all very well, but not until called for. I’ve heard what happens to people who let go, especially if they live alone. It starts with not going out to buy food. Soon I wouldn’t bother to dress or comb my hair, would even leave off washing. I wouldn’t make the bed, since I’m so often in it or on it. Yes, it is my lover, but in time lovers stop preening for each other and allow themselves to be seen in disarray, even dishevelment.

  With no food in the house I might stop eating altogether, though more likely, not being of an anorexic persuasion, I’d languidly lift the phone to order a pizza or Chinese food (my sallow tinge and yeasty smell shocking the young fellow who bikes it over to the door), then leave the remains—burnt crusts, white cardboard cartons with soy sauce dripping out the bottom—wherever I happened to be at the last bite, probably in bed, where one day I’d be found—Mona or Joyce or Jilly or even Q. having prevailed upon the super to open the door since I’d given up answering the phone—my hair matted and my face gray, my eyes dimmed and my fingers on the coverlet making the faint clutching motions of the dying or the mad, the apartment musty with cobwebs and Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate all unraveled on the tape player. As Q., years ago, unforgettably described finding his father in his Georgetown house, after Aldo was widowed and had retired from the Italian diplomatic service. Q. never dreamed it was only the beginning. Since then Aldo has been in and out of mental hospitals more times than I can count. Depression, the experts call it. He’s lost his joie de vivre, is what Q. says. He and his sister Gemma are summoned to Washington at crises to confer with doctors, defrost the refrigerator, air out the house and buy clothing in different sizes, for Aldo’s weight fluctuates wildly when he’s at his worst. At the hospital where he’s been carted off, they jump-start his life with pills. What else? says Q. That’s definitely not performance art.

  So my kitchen is well stocked, not the larder of a person who daydreams of jumping from windows, for art or for real.

  Then there’s the telephone, after the radio my other lifeline. I really ought to call my cousin Joyce but I’m afraid. She might be so concerned that I’d end up having to console her. The delicate calibration of sympathy is, like cooking, an art everyone dabbles in but few, alas, do to perfection. Scrumptious though it is, sympathy must be offered in exactly the right tone to be effective, and in exactly the right proportions, like salt or spices. Too little leaves you deprived or dissatisfied, while too much can make you gag.

  Joyce’s sympathy can be boundless, a flash flood sweeping off everything in its path on a tide of commiseration. Her praise is the same, wildly exceeding its object. When I appeared in my first walk-on, two-line role in a gritty church basement theatre on an East Village street of abandoned buildings, she was as proud as if I’d done Lady Macbeth at the Old Vic. “Stop it,” I hissed, “you’re embarrassing me.” “What do you mean?” she protested in her symphonic tones. “I’m so thrilled I could weep.” “Well, don’t,” I warned. What if I really were playing Lady Macbeth? She leaves no margin.

  Joyce herself knows no bounds, a lushly unkempt, radiant woman whose tremulous musical voice pours from her throat like liquid gold, an anthropologist who has attached herself and her professional future to a small tribe in West Africa (though she tells me I must call it an ethnic group or, even better, a native nation). She blossomed out of the ruddy, good-hearted girl I played with growing up. I was an only child and Joyce became the self-styled big sister, the point man, so to speak, for perilous ventures into the steamy jungles of adolescence. Didactic, protective, she got everywhere five years ahead and passed along the word on menstruation, sex, and filling out college applications.

  “Oh, that’s awful,” she said soothingly over the phone. A mild molassesy tone. “I had a feeling all wasn’t well when I didn’t hear from you in so long. But look, you’ll carry on. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.”

  She meant it, too. It was she who appeared, scarves whirling, to take me to the hospital in a cab the long-ago night I had the miscarriage. And later when Ev died, she arrived promptly, bracelets jangling, to manage everything. Still, I kept a wary distance.

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “You sound very low. I can hear it in your voice. But look, you’re strong, Laura. You’ll rally. Look, I don’t know whether this would help, but you could try my physical therapist. She does excellent massages for aches and pains.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I really feel terrible for you. What a thing to happen. I’d be utterly devastated. Not to be able to—Oh, I can imagine how—”

  Ah, here we go. The waters had been gathering slowly. I started to say good-bye before they split the dam of self-restraint. We arranged to have lunch as soon as I got back from the Cape.

  “If you like, I’ll come by for you in a cab.”

  “No, thanks, Joyce. I can manage.”

  I KEEP GOING. Continue, as the Tai Chi teacher says. Persevere in my own being, as I once had a brave heroine who knew Spinoza do in the face of adversity greater than my own. How easy it is to have characters behave with pluck and virtue. I admire her more than ever; that fantasy of mine.

  Weeks ago I’d promised to speak at a panel discussion honoring a great Italian woman writer who recently died, and dammit, I’d get there. I didn’t prepare any formal remarks but I knew the subject well. Words, as usual, would come to my aid. More important was what to wear.

  Before rummaging through the closet, I switched on my friendly radio, which obliged with just the sort of diversion I craved. An Italian city official from Verona was being interviewed, through an interpreter, about the search for a woman to answer the many letters addressed to Juliet Capulet, since the person who for years had been answering Juliet’s mail was retiring. The dress fell from the hanger as I stood entranced. Letters came from all over the world asking Juliet’s advice on problemi di cuore, which the interpreter translated as “relationships.” Even with the meager Italian I’d picked up from Q., I could bet that problemi di cuore were not “relationships.” Verona needed a person who could write back with warmth and understanding. Well, this certainly qualified for the “nice work if you can get it” category. I’d gladly learn Italian. Q. could help with the finer points over the phone. But would I qualify otherwise, with my history, that is? In prompt response, the interviewer asked how come so many people seek Juliet’s advice, seeing that she did not fare so well in her own relationship? Evidently, replied the Italian through the interpreter, the letter writers feel that despite if not because of that fact, Juliet would be sympathetic to their problemi.

  It was painful to tear myself away from this discussion, but I managed to get downstairs, waved to Luke reading his paper in the calm of early evening—he gave a suave approving nod at my efforts to dress for the occasion—and climbed into a taxi.

  The dr
iver was Greek. Before long we found ourselves discussing the Greek origins of democracy (never mind the slaves and women, save the energy for the talk), as well as Socrates and his cohorts in the agora, the hemlock and so on. Very nice to sit back in an air-conditioned car, shielded from the horns and sirens, hearing almost firsthand about classical antiquity. Not at all a bad way to pass the time, though it soon appeared I might be spending the entire evening: the driver, notwithstanding his Attic wit and learning, couldn’t find a thread through the labyrinth of lower Manhattan and I wasn’t much help. Factor in the late rush-hour traffic and the trip took twice as long as it would have done by subway. We parted with genuine regret, and I went woozily through the auditorium toward the room behind the stage.

  “Just in time, Laura,” the moderator greeted me, a rising young literary star with the aplomb of a talk-show host. “You can leave your bag here, the ladies’ room is back there if you want it, but hurry up because we’re going out there pronto.”

  “Fine. Can I just sit down for a second?”

  The others were pacing around, gossiping, glancing at their notes, adjusting their bra straps. I sank into a chair and a veil of gray descended over my eyes. Then the floor was rising to meet my face. I dropped my head down to my knees.

  “Laura, are you okay? What is it? Stage fright?” It was Charlotte, a kindly older writer I’d shared a stage with twice before. She bent down and patted my shoulder.

  “Nothing. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “Why don’t you go and arrange chairs or something, Vicky, so they know we’re on our way. And someone bring Laura a glass of water.”

  The faintness passed. I tried to sit up straight but hadn’t the energy to raise my head. My arms and legs were turning to sand again. “I don’t think I can do this, Charlotte.”

  “Your face is pretty gray.” She waved the others off. “Here, drink this. Maybe you’re getting that flu that’s going around.”

  I tried walking a few steps but it was no use. The couch across the room beckoned irresistibly and I fell onto it.