“Sorry, I’m late,” he said—and added, joking, “I hope you waited for me.”
But she hadn’t. He found her still, peaceful, the helium hood tucked neatly around her head and neck like a veil. Teasdale’s book lay on her coverlet. In her hands, she clutched the cassette recorder. On a Post-it Note affixed to the machine, in a scrawling, hardly human hand, he recognized the letters P-L-A-Y. He had enough sense not to call 911.
The voice on the recording was the strongest he’d heard from Delilah in weeks; later, he recognized that she’d taped her final testament in advance:
If I know you well, Millard, you’ve been having second thoughts. You’re going to ask me to hold out a few days longer. And I love you dearly, so if you asked, I’d probably give in. But I don’t want that. Now is my time. I couldn’t risk the chance of missing it. Please forgive me, as you are a lovely person and I truly adore you.
That was all. The remainder of the tape was blank.
PART 3
EVENING
13
Millard did not allow himself time to mourn.
Once he started grieving, he feared there’d be no stop to his anguish. Who could say what other emotions might also follow his heartache—fear, panic—to prevent him from fulfilling his pledge to Delilah and completing his own plans. Already, he sensed those malign, subconscious demons that Hal Storch had championed encroaching upon his psyche, the tickle of a “life instinct” laboring to disturb his curated death. But he refused to buckle. The circumstances called for action, not wallowing. How different from those minutes and hours immediately after Isabelle’s passing, when the hospice nurses attended to every last detail, leaving him and Maia to watch their ministrations with a combination of dependence and awe. Eventually, he’d taken his daughter to the souvlaki grill across the street, where they’d wept and shared stories and laughed through their tears, while gorging themselves sick on baklava, until Isabelle’s brother phoned to confirm the funeral arrangements. That had been a public death, a collective mourning. Cousins from as far away as Auckland and Johannesburg had sent condolences. With Delilah, he was on his own—nobody, other than doormen and delivery boys and her niece in Tel Aviv, even knew of their attachment. Except for the Compassionate Endings folks, sort of, but he couldn’t exactly expect a sympathy call from his handler at Johns Hopkins.
Millard followed the organization’s instructions step-by-step. His foremost responsibility was to empty the helium canister, then secure both the cylinder and the hood inside an Acrilan duffel bag that he’d previously stashed beneath Delilah’s bathroom sink. Arnold had once used the bag to stow the catcher’s gear he’d schlepped to his sleepaway camp in the Berkshires each summer; later, it accompanied Lysander to Wesleyan and acquired doodles of rhinoceroses and peacocks. Millard had blotted these out with black marker. After snipping off the labels, he’d inspected the fabric—both exterior and interior—for any other identifying features. He intended to haul the bag to the locked storeroom in the cellar of his own building and to discard it among the unclaimed bicycles and forsaken appliances; years might elapse before the co-op conducted any meaningful spring cleaning, possibly decades. All of this effort to cover up a woman’s rational decision about how and when to die. What a bizarre, priggish civilization, he lamented, that demanded such extremes of ordinary people.
Millard’s postmortem responsibilities were, at least in the eyes of Compassionate Endings, as important as his role as a guide. The organization dreaded any material connection, however remote, to its dirty work. That was why Millard had chosen hanging for himself instead of asphyxiating on noxious vapors; there’d be nobody available to remove his used helium hood or his spent gas flask, so suspicion would inevitably have fallen, rightly or wrongly, upon the aid-in-dying group with their distinctive techniques. Not that he owed the suicide folks anything, but he didn’t wish to sabotage their efforts. They were well-intentioned people, after all, despite their Stalinist streak. Candidly, he also worried that if the coroner’s office did discover the moral fingerprints of Compassionate Endings on his death, his survivors might suspect coercion, and he wanted the world to know that he’d left the planet on his own terms.
Once he’d secured Delilah’s paraphernalia inside its receptacle, which barely fit and required him to tug on the zipper with the duffel bag braced between his thighs, Millard scanned the apartment for other incriminating items. In the sitting room, he found his lover’s morbid, three-volume suicide library neatly stacked on the escritoire; Millard stuffed these texts into his own medical satchel. He slid the collection of Millay poems onto the shelf in the study between a biography of Betty Comden and a trio of George Bernard Shaw plays. Nearby, he found two dozen business-sized envelopes, each revealing the underlying impression of a miniature cassette tape. Delilah had addressed these months earlier, over the course of several weeks, while her handwriting had remained decipherable. The deterioration in the quality of the penmanship from the first to the last stood as a testament to her overall decline.
Millard recognized the names of several veteran Broadway actors among the recipients, including one B-list celebrity he’d thought to be long dead. Also several male names he did not recognize. He couldn’t help wondering whether these men had been her lovers. And how many of them, if any, had she actually loved—to the depth that he’d loved her? Now that would be a clever invention, he mused. A device to gauge degrees of affection, maybe based upon polygraph technology or measured through implanted electrodes. While biotech companies searched for the Holy Grail of a love thermostat, seeking aphrodisiacs that might turn on and off affection or passion, what the world truly wanted was a thermometer to assess the devotion that had already been proclaimed. Salter’s Yardstick for Love. Devising and patenting such a device would almost be worth surviving into his dotage. Almost.
At the bottom of the pile—in the most stable hand, as though written first—he found his own name and address. Millard K. Salter, MD. So formal. So austere. These scraps were all that remained of Delilah now: names scrawled across envelopes, brief farewells preserved on audio tape, an apartment cluttered with play scripts and bric-a-brac. And all that endured of Isabelle were a terrycloth robe and a red notebook and a carton of expired cosmetics he kept forgetting to carry down to the curbside. And all that remained of Millard K. Salter, MD, soon enough, would be a black medicine bag and a few faded snapshots and whatever other mementos Maia claimed from the apartment. Also a lavish letter of recommendation and a conflict over his job. And memories, of course, but memories were capricious and fleeting.
Millard gave the sitting room a last cursory once-over, then poked his head into the bedroom and the kitchen. On winter vacations to Fort Myers, Florida, as a child—the entire family packed into a Pullman car for thirty-six hours—Millard had watched his father scour their hotel room, on the night prior to departure, investigating beneath the beds and behind closet doors as though searching for a misplaced gemstone. (Your Papa’s greatest fear, his mother complained, is that a chambermaid should find a nickel.) Sometimes, his father induced him and Harriet to join in his labors, to make a family game of hunting for loose change and misplaced toiletries; Lester, already too old, found the enterprise demeaning. Now, out of habit, Millard climbed down to one knee and peered into the dusty recesses beneath Delilah’s bed; the springs sagged nearly to the carpet. He checked behind her ancient Kenmore sewing machine—a make no more advanced than the devices his female classmates had used in home economics at Hager Heights. He rummaged through the medications inside the cabinet above the toilet—calamine lotion, Vicks VapoRub, tinctures of iodine. Half-spent bottles of amoxicillin and simvastatin stuck to the shelving paper. What he was looking for, if anything, he couldn’t explain. But in spite of himself, he sensed the tears welling. Never again would he complete a crossword puzzle to Delilah’s directives, or argue with her over the merits of Lillian Hellman, whom he admired and she found doctrinaire. Never again would he—
Enough, dammit, he threatened himself. Eyes on the ball.
Millard plucked the duffel bag from the sofa and departed quickly, shutting the door to each room as though preparing for a fire drill. He left the air conditioner running in the sitting room to keep the corpse in good shape until the private nurse returned in the morning. When they’d find his body was another matter entirely: He hoped that his colleagues would have the good sense to send the police to his door, but knowing Stan Laguna, that might take days. Or maybe Carol would grow anxious if he didn’t return her call, but that seemed farfetched. Such was the magic of the future—the future that he was forsaking: Anything might be possible. Virginia Margold could decide to pay him a visit, rather than phone, and persuade bull-browed Barsamian to let her into the apartment. That would certainly give her a story for the road. On a positive note, he reflected, he could now meet Maia for dinner.
Descending to the lobby, the elevator jolted spasmodically—nothing violent, but enough to remind him of Shorty McTeague’s misfortune. Twice, the car stopped mid-floor without opening, and Millard was contemplating calling for help over the emergency intercom, when the plunge resumed. Travel by elevator was a testament to faith, after all, practically a religious act, although few thought of it in those terms. No different than flying in an airplane or crossing a bridge. You trusted—blindly—that someone had inspected the cables, that all of the sheaves had been lubricated. A strange, neurotic alarm seized Millard that he might die prematurely. Rationally, the consequences of keeling over in Delilah’s lobby, or being hit by a cab outside the 33rd Street post office, differed little from hanging himself inside a bathroom closet a few hours later, but nonetheless, he suddenly dreaded those missing minutes and the implicit disorder they might bring. A genuine relief spread through him when the elevator landed safely on the ground floor and the iron grate slid open.
“Evening, Dr. Salter,” said the doorman. “How’s Miss P.?”
Millard was appreciative of this question for a change.
“Doing just fine,” he replied. “Resting comfortably.”
Outside, the recent squall had wrung much of the moisture from the atmosphere, leaving behind a pleasant late-day warmth. Downtown traffic glided swiftly on the avenue. Although he had more than a good hour left to drop off the cassettes at the post office, and still rendezvous with Maia at seven thirty, Millard decided to risk a cab. Why not? He could afford it.
The vehicle he hailed belonged to an umber-skinned man whose license, posted on the closed partition, identified him as Mouktar. He had no political slogans affixed to his dashboard, only a green and blue flag with a red star that Millard did not recognize. Reggae music pulsed through the change hatch in the divider. Mr. Mouktar repeated their destination—“Thirty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue”—and uttered not another word. Several times, Millard considered broaching a conversation, hoping to distract himself, but the driver’s austere expression, almost a grimace, kept him silent, and by the time they reached Columbus Circle, Mouktar was speaking rapidly into his cell phone in French. Millard’s linguistic skills were rusty, but he remembered enough to understand that the fellow was arguing with his wife over money.
They cruised through the theater district, fighting for ground between ripples of tourists. Millard had hoped for a chatty, offbeat driver like Konnie with a K, but the reality was that all cab rides, no matter who steered, were fundamentally the same. A passenger might have the most enthralling discussion about Renaissance poetry or African politics or even healthcare, as Millard had once enjoyed with a Cuban exile who’d previously worked as a transplant surgeon, but at the end of the ride, you paid your fare and the relationship was over. A one-time interaction—with no potential for a future social relationship with your chauffer. You didn’t see him ever again. Unless, of course, he picked you up on a different occasion, which was statistically as likely as surviving two commercial jet crashes—except in European cinema, where it appeared to happen frequently. Funerals, Millard reflected, also shared a certain uniformity. No matter what transpired in the mortuary or at the graveside, the dead stayed dead. Maybe not in Irish folklore, where corpses had a pesky habit of arousing at wakes. But for Jews, at least, the dead stayed dead.
“Right side or left?” asked the driver.
Mouktar remained on the line with his wife, holding the phone away from his ear so that Millard could hear the woman shouting while he instructed the driver. For a moment, he considered leaving the duffel bag behind in the vehicle, but he feared the next passenger might panic at an unattended bag and phone the authorities. Everybody, it seemed, was seeing something and saying something these days, and the last thing Millard desired was to spend the final night of his life in a Homeland Security holding cell. At the same time, he didn’t want to lug the duffel with him to meet Maia. She might recognize it and grow suspicious. He paid Mouktar, tipping exactly fifteen percent, and carried the bag to the sidewalk.
Millard considered leaving the paraphernalia at the curbside in front of a random high-rise—but feared a vigilant doorman or porter might spot him on a security camera. In college, Lysander’s friends had “appropriated” a one-way sign that had fallen during a lightning storm, and the boy had brought the “souvenir” home with him for winter break. At first, Millard had insisted that his son discard the placard immediately, not wanting to be arrested for harboring stolen government property in his apartment, but ridding oneself of an eight-foot-high city traffic emblem proved—not surprisingly—rather a challenge. To Millard’s knowledge, the object still stood in the co-op’s basement storeroom, propped against a far wall behind a mutilated Suzy Homemaker oven that had belonged to a long-deceased board member. So he understood that divesting himself of Delilah’s suicide contraband was no easy feat.
A municipal bus stopped opposite the post office, scooping up a file of commuters. Millard waited for the vehicle to pull away, then entered the Lucite enclosure. His only company was a teenage boy, eyes closed, catnapping in the crook of the artificial glass. A decal-encrusted skateboard rested on the boy’s lap. Not exactly the sort to phone the FBI. They’d actually had a competitive skateboarder as a patient on the consult service a few months back, a professional who’d shattered his pelvis in a career-ending vault at eighteen and had contemplated suicide. Millard had assigned the kid to one of his younger colleagues; he still couldn’t conceive of skateboarding as an occupation, any more than macramé or latch hook. Especially for a clean-cut white boy from Long Island. Yet at least he didn’t have a shard of metal through his nose like Lysander. And he’d had a job!
Millard set the duffel bag down on the bench, then inched away from it, as he’d seen others do at weddings, discarding olive pits and leftover slices of cake on buffet tables. A moment later, two elderly women seated themselves in the shelter, but paid the neglected bag no heed. He’d read in Psychiatry Today about skilled nursing facilities that employed fake bus stops as decoys for demented residents, allowing escaped Alzheimer’s patients to wait for nonexistent rides until they could be escorted back to the home by staff members. The article noted that the stops often displayed counterfeit advertisements dating from earlier generations, pitching products like Brylcreem pomade, Gensacol varnish, Calox tooth powder. In his day, Millard had used them all.
He patted his pockets dramatically as though he’d misplaced something, creating a pretext to depart before the bus arrived. “I’ll be right back,” he said. Loud. One of the women looked up briefly, then returned to her reading, some form of religious tract with a harp on the cover. Millard strode quickly toward the steps of the post office without looking back. His advance scattered a flock of pigeons, which recongregated nearby in the shade.
Millard couldn’t recall the last time he’d visited the central post office—certainly not since he’d lost Isabelle, maybe not since his divorce—yet he found its very existence reassuring, the aura of permanence exuded by its towering Corinthian colonnade. Unlike Denny Dennmeyer’s
branch post office, a structure as flimsy as a house of straw, the Farley Building’s pavilions of Brescian marble and hand-painted coffered ceilings had been built to withstand crowds of thousands, and jerry-rigged gas explosions, and even the tug of history itself. Of course, one might have said the same of Pennsylvania Station, whose matching colonnade had towered directly across Eighth Avenue, a protective brother looking after its younger sib, before the solons who ran the city traded in the landmark depot for a second-rate sporting arena and shipped the remnants to New Jersey for landfill. As a boy, Millard’s Florida family vacations had started at Penn Station. Later, the Salters had gone to the terminus to see his younger sister off to a nursing school in New Orleans. His most vivid memory of the post office stemmed from the final days of the war, Papa sending money for the transatlantic passage to a Zarakowski who’d been reported alive in a displaced persons camp. He remembered the solemnity of the transaction—his father stoic, the female clerk businesslike—and the lecture his Papa gave him on responsibility as they rode the El back to the Bronx. With the fur business crippled by wartime restrictions, the ticket had cost his old man nearly a week’s receipts. The displaced Zarakowski—probably not even a cousin—died on the layover in Le Havre.
“Yo, mister,” cried a voice. “Your bag.”
Millard turned to face the kid from the bus stop. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen—all bone and sinew—sporting an untucked crimson shirt with a popped collar and a pyramid-studded belt. One hand held his skateboard, SLEEP LESS, SKATE MORE emblazoned across the underside of its deck; over the opposite shoulder draped the discarded duffel. With a deft motion of his arm and torso, he set the bag down in front of Millard.
Millard Salter's Last Day Page 20