Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  Gene didn’t know about this. He couldn’t say what Janice would have wanted. After all, she was dead, having choked on a sandwich while alone at home. He didn’t believe, as his religious mother-in-law did, that Janice was watching over them and approving or disapproving of their behavior.

  “That is just so insensitive,” said Kate, Janice’s younger sister. “She’s only been dead two years and you’re going to Las Vegas.” Even his own brother, not one to miss a good time, sighed and admitted, “Well, I could think of less tacky places to be observant.” Gene, ignoring the criticism, wanting only to please Tess, invited everyone to join them; he wasn’t surprised when no one accepted.

  He’d promised Tess that she could bring a friend. And she had, Allie, who was as tall as Tess was short. They made quite a pair strolling through the casino arm in arm, careful not to step off the carpeted track for anyone under twenty-one and into the gambling areas.

  They raced off to the pool, wearing their bikinis under their cover-ups. Janice would have had a word to say about this—indeed she would have made both of them change or never let Tess buy the revealing suit in the first place. Starting as she was to develop at an astonishing and uncomfortable pace for Gene, her suit showed off to explicit proportions the same maturing curves that her mother had possessed. Allie, by comparison, was long and thin, as lacking in bust as Tess was plentiful.

  He had a list of medications for Allie’s allergies, a medical release for emergencies, cell phone numbers—three of them—and a roll of money that Allie’s parents insisted on his taking, even though he’d said it was his treat. He was just barely getting by on his salary. Janice had worked as a doctor’s receptionist, and her job offered good benefits and stable employment, unlike his position. In fact, he was fairly sure when he got back that either (a) the Denver paper would not exist or (b) he’d lose his job anyway. No matter that he’d been there for fifteen years and had won a Pulitzer for his series on the Denver Christmas blizzard of 2006 that had shut down the city, immobilized its airport, and sent him out to interview stranded, near-frozen motorists, some of whom had been in their cars for thirty-six hours. That was so then, as Tess liked to say. And (he hated to think of it in these crass terms, but such was the reality) Janice had left them with little. A minimal life-insurance policy and no survivor benefits. Who planned for such things anyway—choking on a sandwich! People didn’t really die from such a cause. Somebody was always there to rescue you, perform the Heimlich maneuver. You almost choked to death like you almost died from being too hot. It was an exaggeration, more a figure of speech than fact. How many times had he heard people say, “I almost choked on…” Whatever. A piece of meat, a grape. But with Janice it had been the real thing, dying alone, her face as blue as a dead baby’s.

  A month after Janice died, Tess told him “I want you to remember that I hate spinach, and that I get headaches in April, and that I can’t walk as fast as you, and that Mom and me used to put our foreheads together and stand like that without talking, and that I get the hiccups when something scares me.”

  Such directness of communication all seemed so long ago now, when he swore his allegiance to remember every tiny detail of his daughter’s life, never forget an orthodontist appointment, make it to every school play, recital, and tennis match, and generally be the Greatest Single Parent Alive. He’d started a shared journal; they were each to record their more personal feelings in its pages. No facile texting, emailing, tweeting…just a solitary fountain pen next to a leather-bound journal.

  At first Tess wrote openly: I’m sad up to my neck and only my head is clear. Which he’d interpreted to mean she felt all the grief in her twelve-year-old body but kept her mind busy enough to function. But the rules of the journal dictated that you couldn’t question the other person about what was put down. Gene wrote, I hope you’ll forgive me if I say anything stupid over which Mom would have rolled her eyes and told me to go wait in the other room while she spoke to you. Tess drew a smiley face beside that one. He wrote about how wonderful her birth was and how ecstatic he and Janice were when she was born (“we tried for years”), and how they used to stare at her as a baby and sigh over her gorgeous eyebrows and dark, excitable eyes.

  But gradually the journal morphed into a place for Tess to note her social life. I have two-tone nails, a blue stone toggle bracelet, black high heels, and a party dress from Indigo Rose, she wrote about going to her first dance. Ryan’s not as short as some and has less acne than others, she observed about the boy who was taking her. Funny! Gene jotted next to it. Then, shortly after Tess turned fourteen she wrote Why can’t I wear a thong? And Gene wrote back, Do I need to give you an entire social discourse on why you can’t wear a thong? Tess had written NO!!!! And underlined it three times. That was the end of their journaling. He made a few more stabs at neutral entries (I’m cooking your favorite tonight—mac and cheese from scratch and I think we could watch the movie Thirteen together, if you would be comfortable) but she hadn’t bit on any of these and the pages remained blank over the next several months. It wasn’t until they started talking about how to commemorate the second anniversary of Janice’s death that Tess wrote in the journal again: LAS VEGAS—HOT!

  It was hot all right—the temperature sign outside the hotel registering 110 at nine o’clock in the morning. The girls had been up since six, watching TV while waiting for Gene to awaken and supervise them. He’d heard them moving around in their side of the suite, but couldn’t make himself get out of bed—no excitement in his joints. Surely this was a sign of depression, or a deeper depression than the anti-depressants he’d been given by his family doctor could mitigate. He had seen a therapist, but his health plan, recently updated (more like downdated), limited him to six sessions, and he pretty much exhausted those the first week talking about how ludicrous it was that Janice died because of choking on a sandwich when she was in perfectly good health, fantastic health, actually. Unlike Gene, she exercised faithfully, ran marathons, sweated through Bikram yoga, ate sensibly, and was super conscientious, given she worked in a doctor’s office, about washing her hands. She rarely got sick. Her immune system, she used to say, came compliments of five generations of Irish stock that had survived epidemics, famines, and alcohol.

  Meanwhile, Gene sometimes nursed a cold for weeks that would inevitably turn into bronchitis and twice pneumonia. He was overweight by thirty pounds, hard of hearing at forty-six, both his elbows had bursitis, and he was a negligent flosser with receding gums. His father had died of a coronary at fifty-four and his mother of cancer three years later. By the natural laws of predation, he should have been the one picked off like a sickly gazelle. There was no earthly reason why Janice, a perfect specimen of health and vigor, should wind up stone dead instead of him.

  He suspected people were embarrassed to talk about the nature of Janice’s death, as if it were slightly in that category of being the victim’s fault, like drunk driving. Something for which you had to take personal responsibility. Only one person, their dotty next door neighbor, Louise, had spoken up loudly at the funeral and dared to ask, WAS THE SANDWICH STILL IN HER THROAT WHEN THEY FOUND HER? Someone hushed her up—Neil, the husband, maybe—the appropriate appalled whispers had been sounded, but old Louise had hit it on the head with her morbid curiosity. Most untimely deaths dignified themselves by their dramatic circumstances: the catastrophe of a plane crash; the ferocious consumption of a fire; the brutal decline from cancer; the swift strike of a heart attack; the sucking undertow of a drowning. You felt the hand of God in these cases, the reminder of a force snuffing out life with a destructive smack. But to choke on your lunch was to be sabotaged by an effort to nourish yourself. Death came not galloping on a winged black stallion with a sickle to do battle . . . but with a peanut butter and cucumber sandwich to waste you. Just a big fucking joke.

  Oh, he was bitter all right.

  He sat by the side of the pool reading while the girls went down the water slides. The clientele were
either bronzed and buff singles, or honeymoon couples, or screaming children on summer vacation. Meanwhile, the pool was so crowded you could walk across it on people’s heads.

  Tess and Allie popped up in front of him, their hair dripping wet and their faces full of girlish excitement. “We were invited to a party!”

  “What!” said Gene, rising quickly from his chaise.

  “Shh,” said Tess. “You’re embarrassing us.” And it was true, several of the shimmering brown bodies on the chaises had roused themselves and shielded their eyes to see what his outburst was about.

  “Okay,” said Gene, lowering his voice a notch, “you understand that this is dangerous and that such men—”

  “They were our age,” put in Allie, who with her height could easily pass for sixteen.

  “I’m sure not,” said Gene.

  “Really, they were,” said Tess. “We carded them.”

  “You what?”

  “We made them show us their school IDs. They’re going into ninth grade like us.”

  “Listen,” said Gene, trying to keep his voice that of a reasonable adult and not a hysterical widower with two hormonally at-risk teenagers in Sin City. He had visions of thirty-year-old pedophiles shaving to baby-faced extremes and using fake middle-school IDs to lure girls into depraved quarters. “You are not going to any parties, you are not going anywhere without me, and you are not going to give out any personal information about yourselves.”

  “Mr. Guthridge,” said Allie, “Tess already explained to them that we couldn’t accept their invitation. By the way, your shirt’s buttoned crooked.” When she came over, Allie would always look around for something to tidy at the house. She’d fold the towels properly, stack the magazines squarely, put the salad dressings in their right places in the refrigerator door. She also organized Tess’s closet, fixed her sluggish computer, and cooked dinner at their house when Gene wasn’t around. He’d more than once heard Tess favorably call Allie “Mom.”

  “Well, I’m proud of you then,” said Gene. “Both of you. You’re going to get a lot of attention now that you’re getting older and—”

  “We know,” said Tess, raising her hand like a traffic cop for him to stop. “You haven’t even gone swimming yet, have you?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” said Gene. “We should go get ready for tonight.”

  Terrible visions of losing them and having to explain to family members why he and the FBI were presently negotiating a ransom with Eastern European gangsters disguised as ninth graders made him insist on following closely on their heels, as they took the elevator up to their room to change for the evening into more modest clothing.

  Sex was not something he let himself think about. Curtailing such thoughts was less difficult than he would have imagined at one time when he was in better shape and had a willing wife. Now all he had to do to shut down his libido was look at himself in the mirror: the slack skin of his cheeks; the hair loss that had accelerated since Janice’s death; the belly that had widened his navel into a small hairy mouth. Ugh. And the anti-depressants did their job, too, falling just short of chemical castration. Oh, God, he could be so tough on himself. If Janice could only see him now. Of course, according to his mother-in-law, she was watching all the time, disapproving of his being in Las Vegas with his fourteen-year-old daughter and his prurient thoughts about contacting an escort service. “Hello, I’m Gene,” he said to his reflection. “Please send a companion up to the fat man’s room.”

  “Can we go now?” Tess called from the door of their adjoining room.

  “In a minute,” he said. He deliberated what shoes to wear. The thought of walking on the hot pavement in hard shoes made his feet ache. But they were going to a magic show later at the Monte Carlo, and he imagined they had to dress up a little nicer for that than being the slob he was around this fading discount hotel.

  He put on his loafers and khakis and cinched his belt painfully tight so he’d remember not to gorge himself. He knocked on the girls’ connecting door. They appeared in full makeup, including eyeliner so dark that they looked only a generation removed from the Pharaohs. Thankfully their dresses were of reasonable length—Tess’s white and strapless, and Allie’s peach-colored with a ruffled neckline and hanging loosely from her narrow shoulders. They had on platform sandals that he knew would kill their feet. The phrase “sensible shoes” belonged to a distant galaxy, far, far away. Their nails were polished to a lacquered shimmering pink—the whiff of acetone had hit him as soon as he opened the connecting door—and they’d washed their hair and blown it dry, despite the instant microwaving heat outside, to a blossoming silky sheen across their shoulders. And here they stood, framed in the doorway, awaiting his approval, as if any male attention, even his, might satisfy their budding sense of power and allure about their approaching womanhood.

  “Well, I wish your mothers could see you now,” said Gene. Their faces fell. Tess especially looked alarmed. “I mean that as a compliment,” he added.

  “Oh,” said Tess. “I get it.” Her voice broke a little.

  By now Gene was so prepared for the disappearing car on stage, along with the child volunteer inside it, that its vanishing (and inevitable reappearance) had little impact. But he’d ooh’d and ahh’d along with the crowd and to make the girls think he was enjoying the show. They themselves found it “just okay.” Tess, a militant animal lover who would have been comfortable throwing blood on fur coats, worried that the doves and bunnies had been abused.

  “Actually,” Allie explained, “the animals enjoy working with the magicians and look forward to the snacks and special treatment they receive.”

  Where she got this very reasonable-sounding information Gene had no idea. But he was used to her knowledgeable observations by now and attributed it to her genius father, a physicist, who at barbeques would smile modestly and brush aside the mention of the New York Times article that had quoted his expertise on a breakthrough in particle physics.

  “I just wish we’d gone to see Cirque du Soleil,” Tess lamented. “They don’t use animals in any of their shows.”

  Gene was feeling pretty annoyed that he’d spent a small fortune for this almost equally expensive magic show and just when he was about to tell Tess to stop her complaining and as a result possibly blow the entire good will of the vacation and the idea that they were here to have fun on the occasion of her mother’s death, Allie the Wise One draped her arm over her friend’s shoulder and suggested, “Let’s go look at the fancy stores and pretend.”

  “Is that all right, Daddy?” Tess said.

  He was so taken aback by her calling him “Daddy” and by Allie’s deft move at distracting her, that he said, “Sure,” and let them run off by themselves to roam the shopping halls of the Monte Carlo.

  He half-sat, half-reclined in a plush chair under a tonnage of crystal chandelier in the hotel’s all-marble lobby. Getting to the show early, they’d checked out the four swimming pools and the upscale casino that wafted European flair and put their own long-in-the-tooth hotel with its worn carpeting, paint-thirsty walls, and smoky (despite the prohibition) hallways to shame. He could almost be seduced by the city’s faux classicism—the steroid-size Roman statues at Caesars Palace—or its opposite, the campy, sexy siren-and-pirate show at Treasure Island. Sure, why not. The girls? They enjoyed the place for what it was, and that’s why he had brought them here, to distract Tess, to associate the occasion of her mother’s death with fun. Oh, that word! Would it ever mean anything to him again? Had it meant much to him before? That was a question Janice used to ask him. “Do you ever think of just having fun?” Sweetly, of course. But it got the point across. His personality “set point” was fairly low, pessimistic and moody, whereas hers was buoyant, untroubled, and conversant with other human beings. At parties, he affected the reporter’s cynical reserve, smiling pleasantly but one-step removed, he knew, from morose. Janice truly was his better half, and her mere presence doused him in a sort of irasc
ible lovableness. She was always taking his arm, or smoothing her hands against the front of his wrinkled shirt, or making peppery if affectionate remarks about his slovenly ways. Oddly, he had never doubted why she cared for him when she was alive and now he questioned it every day: she haunted him with ghostly expectations. He could not shake the idea that he was a complete and utter failure in her dead eyes.

  “I found this incredibly cute bag,” Tess said, running up to him. “And it goes really well with the dress Aunt Kate sent me. Please?”

  “How much?” Gene asked.

  “Not much,” said Tess. “For Las Vegas.”

  He glanced at Allie who kept the neutral expression of a high-end real estate broker on her face.

  “Allie said she’d loan me half the money.”

  Gene made a bird nest of his fingers. “Allie is not loaning you half the money. It’s very generous of her, but if she has to make you a loan beyond your spending money, then this item is ridiculously overpriced to begin with.” To him, this sounded like a reasonable approximation of what Janice would have said. Except it wasn’t. Janice would have said, Let’s go see, and then told Tess no. She would have participated fully in the event until its need, not its goal, had been exhausted.

  “Why don’t you just stab me in the heart,” Tess said, and turned on her heels to go.

  After Gene offered—and they accepted—ice cream as a consolation, they went back to their rooms. He let the girls watch a pay-per-view movie for an exorbitant sum. He’d blocked himself from doing the same, particularly the pornography that only made him bemoan his loneliness. Lust had been replaced for the most part by the less stirring involvement of overeating, as he’d done tonight. Ordering three scoops of cookie dough ice cream with chocolate jimmies, he tried not to look at Allie who, sensibly, had gotten a single scoop of orange sorbet. That girl was in control of her destiny, and anyone else’s, and he seriously considered revising his will to make her Tess’s legal guardian instead of Janice’s sister.