“The town is practically bankrupt as it is.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” Andrew suggested.
“I have a doctor. Dr. Sawyer. I doubt he’d appreciate me wasting his time with a little fall.”
“But if you fall again.”
“It’s those lousy old steps, Andrew. You want to do something for your mother? Make a donation. Maybe we can rebuild the town hall with some decent flooring, and an elevator that actually works, and a heating system that doesn’t require us to practically freeze to death in meetings.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Oh, you’ll look into it, will you? That’s cute.”
“I thought you might be difficult, so I made an appointment with you to see someone at Mass General. He’s a friend of mine. The very best. I’m covering all the costs.”
“What did I say?”
“I know what you said. But I’m asking for me. I want to make sure you’re okay. Is that such a bad thing?”
She looked at him with surprise, as though he had startled her with a memory of himself as a boy.
“No, it’s not a bad thing,” she said. “Will we have lunch afterward?”
“Anywhere you’d like.”
But when the time came, they did not go out to lunch. They did not leave the hospital until the following day.
The tests showed three tumors in her brain. She could see them in the ultrasound imaging. In one frame tiny clouds had shifted and broken apart inside her, or had always been there; in another the tumors were lit up in bright orange coloring, like tiny suns emerging from darkness.
“Tell me,” she said, looking at the doctor looking down at his notes, and when he raised his head he stared just right of her, guilty, despite himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to make you comfortable.”
Andrew thanked him. Irene nodded. They were left in the office alone, as though the doctor had come to visit them at some neutral site, where one might be prone to control their emotions when given bad news.
* * *
“Not much of a bedside manner, that friend of yours,” Irene said to Andrew on the ride home. “You should look someone in the eye when you tell them they’re dying. Don’t they train for that kind of thing?”
“I thought he was fair and honest. It’s not easy for him, I’m sure.”
“Not easy for him? What about me? Of course you’d be thinking of how hard it must be for your dear friend, but not your mother.”
Andrew sighed.
“His hands were a different color than the rest of his body. Did you notice that?”
“Must be from washing them all the time.”
“His nails were perfectly trimmed.”
Andrew started to say something then pretended to cough instead.
“I’m not scared, honey,” his mother said, lying, the way she had lied to Andrew about his pet bunny, Baloo, dying of natural causes, when he had seen, from the kitchen window, Nathan squeeze the life out of him.
Poor Baloo, he thinks now, standing in the mirror, holding a tube of hand lotion.
Don’t think of Mom, or Nathan, or Baloo. Concentrate on not thinking. Wasn’t that when sex was best? Wasn’t that when you were most present?
It used to be that when he was on the road, Kirsten would talk dirty to him. But time and routine have taken from him his sexual desire for her. He tries flipping through images of past girlfriends, all of them now mothers (he believes), flabby, unhappy, annoying; then to porn, women bouncing on cocks with their tits flailing about like swinging speed bags. When he was young, porn was new and engrossing, and he had waited until his parents were in bed and Nathan had begun snoring to look at the then stills of women in magazines, half-naked, lying on some tropical beach somewhere. He would imagine he was there, and what they might say to each other, and what they might do; ask him to rub down their shoulders with coconut-scented lotion, playfully pull at the strings of their bikinis; at first, they would hide their breasts, and then let their hands drop. He didn’t even need to dream about touching or tasting them, he was done by then. But he can’t find his way back to those thick-legged, country blondes he had fantasized over when he was a boy. He needs to feel the hot whisper of a woman’s voice in his ear, her fingers flittering across his back like a score of butterflies, the push of her hips against his, the warmth of her insides as he enters her. He has to return to those first days with Kirsten. That winter, when he saw her outside the dorm, the cold channeling off the lakes, rising from the gorges, burrowing through the stone edifices.
In college, Andrew would wake early and put on coffee. He’d pull a wool blanket over his shoulders and sit at his computer, clicking through the Globe, the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Ithaca Journal, and the Daily Sun. He had never been interested in politics, but it had become clear during his first semester in college that he needed to have some point of view. Hunkered down in his shared apartment, listening to Wu-Tang Clan or A Tribe Called Quest, a rhythmic collaboration with his two-fingered key stroke, the words “High Alert” were in the top right-hand corner of every paper. The most read articles, depending on the paper, mentioned “Anthrax,” “Terrorism,” “Bin Laden,” “WMDs,” and “Tom Brady.”
On occasion, Andrew met with a professor he had grown close to, Dr. Danberry, who taught a course on business ethics, in his large leather-smelling office with windows looking out onto the snowy campus quad. They drank bourbon and arm wrestled. They agreed that the greatest poet of the twentieth century was Cassius Clay. They discussed literature and world history and the current futures markets, reasons for their rises and falls. Cold winter in Brazil, wait for the price to drop on coffee, then buy it low. Andrew looked forward to these meetings. He found most of his classes simple and unengaging. But Dr. Danberry challenged Andrew’s sense of self. He taught Andrew that the problem we can never solve is the perception of our own self-worth.
During his second year in school, a few undergraduates threw themselves off the Cascadilla Bridge. Occasionally, Andrew stood at the center of the bridge and thought of how it would feel for those few moments after the jump. He remembered the time his father had hung him over the Wequaquet River Bridge and how if his father had dropped him, he would not be here. And he wondered if his not being here would change anything. He’d wet himself. In the back of his father’s Wagoneer, he kept his hands under his butt so as not to leave a stain on the seat.
Shepherd, his roommate, had said one night, “Dude, we’re lucky to be alive at this point in time. Our parents had an enemy—communism: Russians and Asians and hippies. But we have everyone, even ourselves. We are all enemies. No heroes, just villains. It’s sort of orgasmic when you think about it.”
Shepherd related everything to sex. He loved love but was never in love. When he brought a girl back from the bar, he turned up the volume on his computer: Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens—the usual suspects of an inexperienced kid. Still, Andrew knew the squeaking sound of bed springs meant a girl’s breathless gasps would follow, and then Shepherd’s grunt as he came. Andrew watched the girls as they stumbled drunkenly past his bed to leave.
What was his secret? Andrew wanted to know.
“There’s no secret,” Shepherd said. “They’re drunk and bored and rich. They don’t have any good stories to tell. What else can they do?”
This sounded perfectly depressing to Andrew.
Because of their schedules, Andrew usually saw Kirsten Staples in the dining hall on weekends. She was the first vegetarian he had ever met. Her tray looked like a small garden alongside a square of yellow cake. She ate alone, slowly and thoughtfully, without a book in front of her or headphones on. Sometimes she closed her eyes after a bite as though savoring her last taste of honey. Andrew wasn’t afraid to talk to girls, but there was something about her he couldn’t hold on to. He had grown into a handsome young man; gone were the thick eyeglasses, wimpy arms, and hairless le
gs. It was as though he’d hit puberty later than most boys, and after daily gym sessions for the past couple of years, except for Sunday, his chest was wide and his arms muscular, and he used his college loan money to buy new clothes—button-down shirts, khaki pants, and a sport jacket for when he met with Dr. Danberry. He had a sharp chin and kept a bit of stubble about his face, shaving every other day, and never wore a hat for fear of going bald.
One day he passed Kirsten sitting on a bench near the clock tower, then stopped suddenly and looked at her turning the lens on her camera. She held it to her eye, then moved the camera aside and looked up at him.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes,” Andrew said, surprising himself. What did he need help with? Think. “I need to celebrate and I thought you might be interested in celebrating with me.”
“What are you celebrating?”
“I’ve finished something I think will change the world.”
“So I’d be celebrating with a world-changer?”
“Maybe.”
“And I’d be a fool to turn down the offer?”
“No, you wouldn’t be a fool.”
“Do you know what I was just looking at before you stepped in the way?”
“What?”
“See that boy over there?”
Andrew looked. The boy was clearly a freshman on orientation. He had thick glasses and neatly combed hair; a campus map fully unfolded, covering his torso.
“See how confused he is? No idea where to go, too afraid to ask. Before you came by, he had stepped off the curb and stepped back. It was the second time he had done that. He keeps staring at the map and pushing his glasses up and looking around at the buildings. I’ve been waiting to get the perfect shot of him.”
“Why?”
“Because that is fear.”
Andrew glanced at the boy again.
“Don’t help him,” Kirsten said. “He needs to learn to be afraid.”
That night Andrew and Kirsten ate pizza and shot pool at a local bar. They were half-drunk, bumping into each other, joking at first, and then Andrew grabbed hold of her and they stayed that way, walking side by side as though they needed each other to stay upright. They stopped at the entrance to the Stone Arch Bridge. Andrew knew then that as time went on, he would have to share with Kirsten his more intimate, secret thoughts. But not now. Not at this moment. Now he had to kiss her to keep from thinking at all.
* * *
Andrew’s cell phone starts to buzz. He checks the face of his phone, an unrecognizable number—857 area code. Better take it, he thinks, maybe I won a sweepstakes. Any and all sweepstakes offers that cross his path via the Internet, hotel counter, restaurant, wherever, he goes in for. He doesn’t care about the prizes, mostly, the luxury cruise or four-night ski vacation. He simply wants to win.
His hands are slippery from the lotion, and as he picks up the phone, it glides out of his grip into the toilet. With the toilet brush, he struggles to get the phone over the seat, guiding it to the rim, then losing it through the rhombus-shaped hole in the bristles. Finally, with a flick of his wrist, he catapults the phone out of the bowl and the face smashes against the wall. He leaves the phone where it is and washes his hands until they’re red and throbbing. He tucks his lips in and, with the long nail on his forefinger, picks at a poppy seed stuck between his front teeth. He only manages to push it farther back and cuts the gum line with his fingernail.
All his life, Andrew seems to have suffered stupid injuries. He’s never broken a bone or been concussed or had a real sickness of any kind (except for slight asthma when he was young), yet he’s prone to episodes of unexpected pain on regions of his body he never worries about. He may sprain an ankle stepping off a curb, or pull a muscle in his neck looking twice before pulling out onto the highway. A few years back, he developed a pimple in his nose he let Kirsten pop with a sewing needle. Then it got infected and the left side of his face began to harden and he had to be taken to the emergency room. The doctor there said if Andrew had waited any longer, he’d have died; the infection was tracking right toward his temple.
“Think about never picking your nose again,” the doctor had said just before delivering a cortisone shot to Andrew’s rear.
Andrew washes his face and brushes his teeth, checks his nose hairs, clips a few, and sneezes. The blackhead is now a red spot on the tip of his nose. He studies his balding head, hoping to see a sprig of hair between the two leaves above and below his ear and around his head. Andrew’s father had once said that hairless people are weak. That stout and certain tone of voice seemed perfected by a sense of wisdom lodged in Andrew’s brain like a bullet shell. His father’s declarations were impossible to forget. Andrew sprays his scalp three times a week with a European formula called Pousser, which is supposed to provide surprising results, according to the advertisements he’s read online. He has considered toupees, but after two weeks of wearing one in Del Mar, California, he developed a score of scabs from scratching the top of his head while he slept at night.
What did it matter what his father had said anyway? His father has been in prison for the last eighteen months for tax evasion, Andrew the only one willing to make the seven-hour drive once a month to Allenwood. They have exchanged thirty-six hugs, played eighteen hands of Gin, walked nine times in the open courtyard during the warm weather, where his father smoked and talked.
“Son, my mind is so clear these days,” his father had said just last week, when Andrew had gone to ask if there was anything he needed to bring. Andrew has already found him a small, one-bedroom cottage, having paid a year’s rent in advance.
“Please, Dad.”
“Really. I don’t see walls anymore.”
“You need to start thinking about what you want to do next.”
“Next?” his father had said, and smiled. “That’s funny.”
But always there was a next. Andrew didn’t trust his father’s sudden serenity.
“Things have a way of working themselves out, Bud,” said his father, the prophet Kelly.
And maybe they did, Andrew thought, but he couldn’t trust a man who’d run from every problem he had ever caused, and made no apologies.
Andrew, on the other hand, has been going about things the right way, and doesn’t he deserve some recognition?
He’s a senior VP at Birken and Associates, a financial consulting firm located in Boston. He and Kirsten have a four-bedroom, three-bath home in Brookline, decorated with Buddhist artifacts and paintings by up-and-coming artists touted in the Globe. They take weekend getaways to Manhattan, the Berkshires, Kennebunkport. They eat small plates in big chairs at restaurants where the prices are never listed. King and Queen in the Country of Oz. The only problem seems to be that there is no problem.
Andrew opens the medicine cabinet and checks Kirsten’s bottle of meds, shakes the pills out in his hand and counts three less from yesterday. Last winter, she had broken her ankle ice-skating, and ever since has kept a prescription of painkillers from various doctors in the city. Andrew has guessed that a good deal of her indifference toward him lately is a result of her inability to give them up. Or maybe it isn’t indifference, maybe the pills grant her a kind of absentmindedness, yielding the noise inside her head.
Kirsten is up, the television is on downstairs. Andrew dresses in jogging pants and a T-shirt. In the living room, Kirsten has her foot raised on a pillow. She doesn’t look at Andrew when he comes down the stairs.
“Gym?” she says, condescendingly.
“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills marathon?” Andrew says.
She throws a magazine at him on his way toward the front door. He picks it up and looks at the cover. Some pop star squeezing a plastic bear of honey into a bowl on her lap. He puts the magazine in his gym bag, lowers his sunglasses down over his eyes, and assumes his carefully constructed presence away from home.
* * *
Andrew revels in the old musk smell of the locker rooms, b
aby powder, shaving cream, combs dipped in Barbicide. He changes and does twenty push-ups on his knuckles, then jogs out onto the main floor of the gym to begin his session with Malcolm, a former navy SEAL, who does part-time surveillance for a private security firm. Malcolm tells the most improbable stories: sniper stories, government conspiracy stories, organ-trafficking stories. Andrew is attracted to how foreign Malcolm’s life is to his own.
“You remember that chick who used to come in here?”
“What chick?”
“The one with the fake tits and big ass. You know, her name was some month. June or May. I forget.”
“April.”
“Yeah. That was it. April.”
“So what happened?”
“She got hit by a bus. She was just walking across the street. Then. Bam!” Malcolm punches his fist. “Bits of her everywhere. You can’t even feel all that bad for her, considering she must have gone like that.” Malcolm punches his fist again.
Andrew curls dumbbells until his biceps burn, drops the weights with a thud on the foam-matted floor. Today he is training in order to keep from breaking apart. He boxes the heavy bag, completes thirty-one pull-ups, and spends twenty minutes on the bike.
“Anyway,” Malcolm continues once Andrew is off the bike. “I’ll bet the bus driver is suffering worse than anyone, except maybe the people on the street who got bits of April on them.”
Malcolm has Andrew thinking about the worst, which leads him to wonder whether or not he appreciates being on earth as much as he should.
“Good set today,” Malcolm concludes, and slaps Andrew on the back. “Be careful out there, amigo.”
On his way home from the gym, Andrew sees a group of high school girls jogging alongside the road. He slows down, pretending to be cautious. A few wave at him and smile, then laugh. He can feel his cock stiffen.
But back home, Kirsten is asleep on the couch, her arms above her head, hands holding her elbows as though propping up a triangular object. He forces them down to her sides. He kisses her on the cheek, a faint smell of cinnamon lingers about her face. At the beginning of their marriage, Andrew had visions of cookouts with the neighbors’ kids and his kids and cold bottles of beer in a cooler on the back porch, Kirsten and the other mothers discussing potential private schools while the men played horseshoes and joked about Midwesterners. But when clients and coworkers showed him baby pictures, he felt a twinge in his chest, like someone twisting the muscle between his ribs. He couldn’t imagine having a family with Kirsten. Or with anyone for that matter.
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