Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  He broke off, and his face crumpled slightly.

  Mrs. Gawfler intervened. “Coffee, my dear?”

  The doubt, whatever it was, passed. Mr. Gawfler smiled dreamily and nodded. A vision of the future came to him. He would drink much good, hot coffee. He would do much good, hard work. He would hone his mind till it was as sharp and clean as a stainless-steel instrument of dissection, and he would lay open the human heart in all its noble faltering, all its muddled glory. It was not for him to use the word “genius”; but someday he would be good, or even great. He would write a masterpiece yet to justify that poor silly man’s praise—and that poor silly woman’s. Perhaps someday he would buy a motor car.

  SYMPATHETIC

  HE DIDN’T RECOGNIZE her at first because she wasn’t wearing her glasses; she didn’t recognize him at first for the same reason.

  “But it’s you!” he cried.

  They embraced, then pulled apart shyly, taking refuge in the scenery.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it!” said Leora.

  “Oh, very beautiful!,” Alex agreed.

  “Couldn’t ask for better.”

  “Not this time of year.”

  “It is a bit windy, I suppose.”

  “That’s true. A bit windy. But it’s a good bright day at least.”

  “Oh, you can’t fault its brightness.”

  “Although it could be clearer, I suppose.”

  “Yes. I like a few clouds, but this …”

  “Yes. You might even call it overcast.”

  “I don’t think that would be going too far.”

  “But at least it’s nice and warm.”

  “No question about that. It’s wonderfully warm.”

  “Though maybe there is just that slightest bit of a chill from time to time in the wind …”

  “I wouldn’t want to be out without a scarf and jacket, that’s for sure.”

  “And yet,” he sighed, “it is a day. There’s no denying that.”

  “Oh indeed, it’s a nice dayey day, if you know what I mean.”

  “We’ve that to be thankful for.”

  “Count your blessings.”

  They walked in happy silence for a while along the tar-black canal. The autumn’s first rot was in the air, making the world smell almost fresh.

  At last he said, “You’ve hardly changed at all, you know.”

  She swung her arms girlishly, so that the wedding band was visible. “I hope that’s not true.”

  “You hope you have changed? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I don’t care much for who I was.”

  After a pause he said, “I did.”

  “Well and what about you? Have you changed or haven’t you?”

  “I think so,” he said sadly.

  “Well then. Perhaps the new you will like the new me.”

  “As much as the old me liked the old you?”

  “Isn’t it possible?”

  It was at this point in her thoughts that the novelist June Cottan ran over a little old lady with her car.

  A startled, shriveled face appeared for an instant above the hood, there was a horrible polyphonic thud, June stamped on the brakes, and the car came to a halt—a more abrupt halt than her braking could account for. It was as if something had jammed the inner workings of the machine. June sat frozen in horror at what she had done, what she would find when she got out. Finally, with a shudder of resolve she threw herself out of and away from the vehicle, then looked back.

  The car had completely swallowed the old woman’s body; only her angry white head protruded from the gap between the front tire and the wheel well. June sank her fingernails into her mouth, cheeks, and eye sockets. She’d killed someone! She’d killed someone! She was a killer! She was—

  When the old woman spoke, June fainted, briefly.

  “Don’t just stand there gawping, dummy! Fetch me my walker!”

  Years of being ignored and flouted (as the old woman saw it) had honed Reginalda Drax’s voice to a razor-edged implement for the extraction of compliance. June complied. All that remained of the walker, however, was a skein of metal projecting from the car’s grille.

  “I think it’s broken.”

  “Broken my eye! You just don’t know how to use it. Give it here!”

  June didn’t know what to do. Her scalp tingled, colors seemed brighter; the very street was suffused with momentousness. This mattered. But she didn’t know what to do. She felt criminally remiss—as if this exact situation were one for which she should have prepared. Why had she never taken a first-aid course, for example? She dithered, flapping her arms helplessly and prancing in place, till Reginalda growled, “Give it here!” This was something June could do. She blew on her hands, planted her foot on the fender, and tugged at one of the twisted bars. When it came loose she staggered backwards—not realizing for a moment that the car had lurched too. It began to roll away downhill, gathering speed. June screamed and chased after it, without any idea what she would do if she caught it. The old woman’s head rotated with the tire, smacking the pavement with each revolution. Reginalda, slightly confused by recent events, had the impression that she was being jostled. Loudly she muttered that people nowadays had forgotten what manners were. Then the car rolled into an intersection, causing several noisy collisions and partaking in several more.

  June, breathless and sick with remorse, followed the convoy of ambulances to the hospital in a taxi.

  June Cottan was a fundamentally cheerful person. That is, most days she felt happy, and when she did not, she felt it her duty to put on a happy face for the sake of others. When she took her dogs for walks, she waved at her neighbors and smiled kindly at strangers because she believed that other people were fundamentally cheerful too. When evidence to the contrary reached her in the form of a frown or a grumble, she chose to believe that these people were merely having a bad day—and her heart went out to them as she imagined in detail the sort of nasty rotten bad luck that could make you frown at someone who smiled at you. She smiled extra widely at these people, but with a wrinkle in her brow to show that she understood them.

  For someone with as much capacity for sympathy as June, an emergency room is hell. It pained her to see so many nice people in such nasty condition. Few of them could or would return her smile; the wrinkle in her brow became a crease. One man had been waiting seven hours, and June’s imagination saw him trudging through seven deserts in search of water. An old woman waited for her husband, and June’s imagination flipped through the photo album of their happy years together, and she shared something of the woman’s anxiety. One young man said to no one in particular that he didn’t think he liked morphine, and June’s bowels knotted in vicarious nausea. A pale girl with a band-aid on her thumb evoked in June’s mind fountains of blood splashing a white kitchen. The sight of a healthy, cheerful-looking fat man caused her to shudder at the ant farm of decay that presumably riddled his interior, the depths of despair that his grin presumably concealed. Her heart went out to everyone. She beamed at them her most supportive smile—an anguished rictus, in fact, which so monstrously contorted her face that everyone in the room generously hoped that she would be first to see a doctor.

  June knew how busy and tired and overworked and footsore the doctors and nurses must be (she imagined them coming home to their small but cozy apartments after sixteen-hour shifts, shouldering the door closed with a sigh, putting on their slippers, running a bath, making a nice pot of tea), and she did not want to be a bother. So she merely gazed at them plaintively as they came and went. None of them met her eye. She tried to guess from their posture, demeanor, and pace whether they had seen a little old woman die that day, or whether on the contrary they had seen a little old woman miraculously recover. When this proved inconclusive, June began to roam the halls and peer into rooms—while making
herself appear as small and healthy and self-sufficient as possible.

  She saw a man in a cast and thought how nasty it would be to have a broken leg. Then she thought how terrible it would be to have cancer. Then she thought how terrible it would be to be married to someone with cancer; then how terrible to have a child with cancer; then how terrible to be the doctor of a child with cancer and be unable to help … In one of the patient’s rooms she glimpsed a bouquet of flowers and her optimism rebounded. How marvelous it would be to be that doctor, and be able to cure that child’s cancer! And how wonderful it would be to be that child’s mother; and how wonderful to be that child! Doctors and nurses, she mused, really were heroes … Perhaps she would write a novel about a child with cancer …

  She turned a corner and heard a voice she recognized scream, “I don’t want to go in there!”

  The scream was so bloodcurdling that June could only picture a gang of thugs shoving poor Mrs. Drax down a manhole or stuffing her into a body bag. June ran down the hall to the old woman’s rescue.

  She paused in the doorway to reevaluate the situation. Reginalda Drax sat propped up by pillows in a hospital bed, the clean white sheets pulled snugly up to her chin. Several feet away, well beyond shoving or stuffing range, stood a short, sad, serious doctor or nurse (June could not tell them apart) with one hand on a wheelchair and the other holding a clipboard.

  “I’m not getting anywhere near that infernal contraption and that’s that!” cried Mrs. Drax. When her mouth flew open and her voice came roaring out, her head seemed disembodied, swaddled there in the bedclothes. To June she said, “Who are you? Get out of my room. I asked for a private room, not a room filled with smelly zombies!”

  The doctor or nurse turned to June. He had a wide, unhappy mouth, which he opened minimally to ask if she was the family.

  Mrs. Drax was aghast. She denied that she had ever seen this strange woman before, much less been related to her.

  June twisted a toe into the linoleum, glanced left and right, and coughed into her fist. It occurred to her that perhaps the sight of the person who had run her over would not be a wholly welcome one to Mrs. Drax. Modulating the truth uneasily, June said, “I was at the scene of the accident. Is she—all right?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me! What’re you asking him for? He’s as much a quack as all the others. I had sciatica for twelve years before they diagnosed it right. Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room. I am in the room. This is my room! I asked for a private room!”

  The nurse or doctor took June aside, and with sober candor, showed her the X-rays. The bones, he explained, showed white; the breaks in the bones were black. June gasped: Mrs. Drax’s skeleton looked like something that had been uncovered by archeologists—or rather, something that had been baked in an oven, methodically shattered with a hammer, then uncovered thousands of years later by archeologists.

  “Frankly,” said the nurse or doctor, underscoring his frankness by gazing into June’s eyes before continuing, “frankly, it’s amazing she’s even alive.”

  June winced. Mrs. Drax said that if they thought she couldn’t hear what they were whispering over there they were crazy; she could hear a pin hit carpet at fifty yards; and if they thought she was going to let them stick a pink chunk of foreign plastic in her ear they had another thing coming. “I’m not getting in no wheelchair neither. There’s nothing wrong with my legs. Just give me my walker and get out of my way!”

  The doctor or nurse looked sadly at the old woman. “Mrs. Drax,” he said, “you have been in a very serious accident.”

  Reginalda Drax denied that this was so.

  “You’ve just come from four hours of intensive reconstructive surgery.”

  Reginalda Drax said that she had not authorized it and would not pay for it.

  “The surgeons did everything in their power, but it is, frankly, unlikely, given the extent of the injuries, that you will ever be able to walk again.”

  Mrs. Drax said that if they would give her her walker she would walk on their graves.

  “Mrs. Drax, I—Your walker, it’s—” A sob of guilt escaped June. “It’s completely broken!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my walker that a drop of oil won’t fix. People these days! A little squeak in the wheel and they throw it on the trash heap. A little wear in the soles and they’re out buying a new pair of shoes. They’re down there at the landfill burning up piles of tires with perfectly good treads on them as we speak. How much tread do you need on the roads around here? You’d think they were at the North Pole or someplace. Snow chains in July! I’ve seen it!” She peered distrustfully at June. “What’re you, chunkalunk, some kind of wandering sales rep for the walker makers? Get out of my room, and take these stinky geezers with you!”

  June’s mouth fell moistly open. “The poor dear,” she reasoned, “she must be in terrible pain.”

  The nurse or doctor shrugged. “She won’t let us give her anything.”

  “When can she go home?”

  “When I was a girl,” Mrs. Drax was saying, “they made things to last. And we knew how to darn a sock, let me tell you. When our building was put on the boiler my mother’d save the lukewarm water that came out before it ran hot. We knew how to stretch a penny, by God! Not like this bunch of charlatans! You know how much they charged my George for a sprained finger—his little finger?”

  “Frankly,” said the doctor or nurse, “the sooner the better.”

  At eight, Reginalda discovered books. At twelve, she discovered boys. Boys seemed not to like smart girls, so she resolved to give up books and to expunge from her vocabulary all incriminatingly clever words—starting with “expunge” and “incriminatingly.” After several unsatisfactory dalliances, she decided instead, at age fourteen, to give up boys. From then on, whenever she was introduced to a boy, she hit at him with large words and literary non sequiturs until he went away. Over time this policy became, as all our policies become, a stereotyped habit. Borrowing a sentence from the heroine of one of her favorite books, she took to saying, on meeting anyone new, “What is your name, and how did you come here, and what are these wet things in this great bag?” It became part of her idiolect. No one understood what it meant; she forgot its origin herself. Then one day, when she was eighteen, a young man quoted back to her the subsequent line: “You had better let them alone; they are loaches for my mother.” It was as if a key had turned deep inside her. They married, and lived happily and unhappily together for thirty years. When George died suddenly, the key turned back and fell out of the lock. She expected daily to die from grief—an expectation that eventually outlived her grief. Twenty years of tomorrows had been unable to shake the conviction that she was going to die soon—tomorrow, probably. Meanwhile the anger she had felt at George’s dying lost precision and became anger at him. She came to believe that she had married badly, that he had been cruel to her, that they had never been happy. She’d made a mistake: she’d been tricked by a silly coincidence and a half-submerged memory. A children’s book had made a fool of her. Never again. From now on she would assume that others were selfish and cruel and would hurt her if given the chance. She would not give them the chance; she would not give them an opening. And so at seventy she went through the world as if with eyes closed, that no one might poke them.

  Reginalda was on her way to see her sons. She went to see them every day, as she did everything she did every day—because she was not long for this world.

  She was not afraid of death; in fact she found it useful. Because her time was so limited, she was obliged to avoid irritants and bores, and other people were obliged to treat her kindly, or indulgently. Her sons, who treated her neither kindly nor indulgently, had at least to make time for her every day if they did not want to find themselves left out of her will. They protested that they didn’t care a damn about any will, but she knew better. After all, they mad
e time for her every day.

  Reginalda waited to cross the street to the taxi stand. It was a busy street; she had been waiting a long time. As soon as she saw an opening (that is, as soon as the street was quite empty), another car would burst onto the scene—several blocks away perhaps, but bearing down fast. People nowadays never stopped for pedestrians; in fact, they sped up when they saw you, either to beat you to the crosswalk or to frighten you back to the sidewalk. She considered the satisfaction that throwing herself under one of these hot rods would give her, and the lesson it would teach these drivers. But this was a daydream: she was no longer capable of throwing herself under anything, or anywhere. She wasn’t as spry as she’d once been. Indeed, Reginalda shuffled along behind her walker so slowly that onlookers were overwhelmed by what they took to be this little old lady’s superhuman tenacity. In fact, she just moved slow.

  She was moving in this way when the accident happened. Suddenly she found herself lying in the street. This sort of thing was occurring more often lately. She blamed it on bad pavement. No one walked anymore these days, so no one cared if the sidewalks were a deadly obstacle course. Possibly someone had knocked her down—she remembered being jostled. She didn’t need anyone to help her up; she just needed someone to put her walker in arm’s reach. But no one wanted to get involved nowadays. They were all scared of lawsuits. They’d sooner watch you drown than toss you a lifesaver they weren’t accredited and authorized to toss. Passersby passed by, bystanders stood by, people stepped over and around her until finally a doctor was dragged in. But doctors were no better than mechanics: if they got their claws into you, they didn’t let go till they’d extracted something expensive. Suddenly she found herself in a hospital. All this fuss over a little spill!