by Robert Cohen
Fortunately he was asleep at the moment. At least that was how he looked from the doorway, where Oren was still standing, clutching the lilac bouquet he’d bought downstairs at the gift shop for $12. Of his own money! When the tulips were only $8! Oh, selfless and charitable, that was Oren Pierce!
Downstairs, entering the lobby, he’d had an intuition of crossing a line in space on the far side of which everything would become unrecognizably strange. Now this seemed confirmed. Selflessly and charitably he stood there, willing Don’s puffy, discolored eyelids—so laced with broken capillaries they were almost beautiful—not to open any farther, while the saline dripped down from its elevated bag, ticking away the seconds like an hourglass. How long was he expected to remain in the doorway with his cotton mouth and his twelve-buck bouquet before he could split? After all, Don Blackburn, whom he had come to console by his presence, was asleep, if not comatose, if not—it was beginning to seem perfectly plausible—dead. There was nothing to be done about that. Still, he should try to do something, Oren thought. The presence of two expectant-looking teenage girls, Don’s children presumably, staring out at him from the jointed photo on the bedstand as if tracking his movements, or rather waiting to track them, left him that much more paralyzed and self-conscious. The older one was about twenty, dark and pretty, with a penetrating gaze and a plump little mouth that reminded him of Sabine.
Sabine! A lock in Oren’s chest sprang open, and all the channels of his heart flooded at once.
He felt thoroughly and stupidly stoned. The framed posters on the walls of the room, bygone exhibitions in distant cities, aroused familiar feelings of roads not taken, opportunities missed. No reason to be here, yet here he was. It had begun to take on in his inner ear the cheerful, chiming inanity of a pop song.
Go, he thought. Go. A hospital was no place for idlers and dilettantes. What was wanted were brilliant, tireless experts, people who knew how to read X-rays, to make incisions, to draw and redraw lines of fate. Oren was only an errand boy, a courier between the adult world and the adolescent mind. That, plus overseeing the lunchroom, scheduling the athletic events, and chaperoning the monthly dances, where he went around breaking up grudge fights and sexual encounters and relieving industrious eighth-graders of their hard-earned Mexican dope. For 36K a year, plus benefits.
He should have gone for the tulips, he thought.
Fortunately to this point he’d been spared much in the way of hospital time himself. Or cheated of it. But perhaps both came to the same thing. In any event, it was, he knew, only a suspended sentence.
It was beginning to seem imperative to either leave or lie down. His mouth was parched, his head tinny and light, like a flyaway roof. Either he shouldn’t have smoked that joint out in the car, or else he should have smoked two. The world, that fat drunk, teetered woozily on its axis. He hadn’t slept well, not last night, not the night before. Come to think of it, he hadn’t slept well in years, not since Sabine had broken their not-quite-engagement, leaving him to honor and comfort himself in sickness and in health. Which was this? He stood clutching his flowers, waiting for the man in the bed to either awaken or not awaken, conclusively. In an effort to speed things along he issued a brief, exploratory cough.
“Zat you?” someone demanded, not Don Blackburn but someone else, behind him and across the hall. “Junior, zat you out there?”
Oren didn’t answer.
“Get over here, Junior, you piece of dirt. I got a message for you.”
Oren looked down at the supine, motionless figure of Don Blackburn, who if bothered by the tone or volume of the voice gave no sign to betray it. Then he eased across the corridor and poked his head into the room directionally opposite, hoping, as usual, to look and not be seen.
“You ain’t Junior.” A stout, white-haired man stared up from his bed through a pair of enormous spectacles. He fingered his sparse goatee. “Who might you be?”
“I came to see Mr. Blackburn.”
“Who?”
“The man across the hall.”
The patient’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses; his gaze, as if under the spell of some vagrant hallucination, took off in a spiral around the room. “That fat guy, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“He your father?”
“Actually I’m kind of his boss.”
The man in the bed let out a hoot.
“Well, it’s true.” Oren felt not so much defensive on the subject as amazed himself. The world’s skepticism and incredulity regarding his progress in life were no match for his own. “He’s a teacher over at the middle school. I’m the vice principal.”
“You don’t look like no principal, son.”
“Actually I’m the acting vice principal, technically speaking. It’s complicated.” Oren perched himself on the edge of the visitor’s chair. “Basically I’m filling in.”
“Sure, I got you.” The patient gave a knowing little nod, as if he and complexity were on good terms. “You’re the pinch hitter. The Gates Brown so to speak.”
“I guess.” Gates Brown? The name cast only a dim light through the fog. Some journeyman ballplayer. Oren had come to baseball, as he’d come to many of his adult interests, rather late, had picked it up by proximity from housemates in college. He didn’t know a lot about it but he knew a little. He was like that with a lot of things. “I’ll leave you alone now. You look like you could use some sleep.”
The man in the bed regarded him warily; he appeared to have arrived at some firm and uncharitable conclusion.
“I’m waiting for Junior,” he announced, and promptly fell asleep.
Oren may have dozed off a minute too, sunk in the wheezing vinyl of the visitor’s chair, because when next he moved he startled himself. Outside the sun was sliding meekly toward the horizon. His eyes felt sandy and gelid, like crusted shellfish. A dull film of saliva clung to his teeth. He was pleased to see that the man on the bed was now snoring mildly through his nose, his hands drawn together on his chest like the lid of some poor knight’s sarcophagus. Good, Oren thought, all the tired men are getting their rest.
He picked up his flowers and tiptoed back across the corridor. An orderly trudged past, pushing a cart with a wobbly wheel. He’d just slip into Don’s room, leave the flowers he’d brought—the petals now hanging their heads in sorrow, or embarrassment—and run on home.
So intent was he on slipping unobtrusively into Don’s room and slipping out again that he almost failed to register two critical pieces of new information. The first was that Don’s bed was empty. Stripped of its linens, it stood exposed in the slanting light for the graceless, inhospitable mechanism it was.
The second bit of news had to do with the chair beside it, which was now occupied. A woman lay sideways against the cushions, her head sunk to one shoulder, her calves draped negligently over the chair arm, a legal pad cradled to her lap, blackened and busy with notes. She failed to move when Oren came in, or to register his presence in any way. Another slumber artist, he thought. He supposed she was Don’s wife. But wait, Don was divorced. Still, she was wearing a ring; she had to be somebody’s wife. Her hands were long and veiny. Like the clothes she wore, and her turbulent, white-flecked hair, and the single row of pearls that hung from her neck, reflecting, at this moment, the violet onset of dusk, they seemed pretty well tended. Her feet were bare, the toes jumbled, heaped together. The inside of her leather briefcase, splayed open on the floor, was paisleyed with scars and bruises, the accordion folds tattered, the pens leaking ink, a pair of knitting needles entangled hopelessly in yarn. If the condition of her briefcase was in any way a mirror of her life (as Oren’s, empty at the moment but for a cheese sandwich, an apple, sixty-two unpersuasive essays on the Battle of Gettysburg, and a bloated social studies textbook, probably was), then this was a life that required some attention, he thought.
“You must be the minister.” Her eyes were open. Her mouth twisted to suppress a yawn.
“Sorry?”
> “I’m Gail. The cousin. They said you were coming down today.”
Oren stared at her. The minister. The cousin. The hospital was a busy place; you needed to speak in shorthand, definite articles. You had to know who you were. “I’m Oren.”
“Oren who?”
“Oren Pierce. I’m at the middle school. I’m acting principal over there.”
“Oh?” A shadow flitted across her eyes. He glanced down at her legal pad: the page was bordered with doodles. “I thought Zoe Bender was acting principal these days.”
“We’re sharing the job, actually.”
“Since when?”
“Since the summer.” Was it really such a Herculean task, being co–vice principal at a mediocre middle school, that no one should believe him capable? “Since the principal turned into some kind of wacko head case and wound up in the county jail, making a lot of extra work for the rest of us.”
“Is that what happened to him?” She picked up one of her knitting needles and began to play with it. “I was wondering.”
“Speaking of head cases, what about your cousin Don? What’s up with him?”
“He has a blood clot in the left part of his brain.”
“I meant, where is he now? Where did they take him?”
“Upstairs.”
“Oh?” Oren wondered if she meant by the word some sort of euphemism.
“Mmm. Intensive care.” She touched the point of the needle to her thigh and held it there, absently turning it back and forth. “He seems to have taken what they call a turn.”
“I see.”
“They want to monitor him more closely. He’s not responding to treatment the way he should, in their opinion. The systolic pressure’s off. I won’t even pretend to know what that means. But apparently he’s not in any immediate danger.” She smiled false-brightly. “Famous last words.”
“I see.”
“You see.” Her eyes skated over him vaguely from beneath their pale hoods. Something sullen in the lines of her mouth suggested to Oren the kind of teenager she’d once been—a very different kind, he reminded himself, than he’d once been—and kept him more conscious than he’d have liked of the needle in her hand. “Do you know Don very well?”
“Not really. We say hello in the hallways. He’s an impressive guy though. All that energy. The kids really look up to him.” Like any bad liar, he’d adopted a tone of vehement sincerity. “I mean, who wouldn’t?”
“And you? Do they look up to you too?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You don’t feel like you’re making a difference? Fighting the good fight? Expanding young minds? Winning over young hearts?”
“I do okay.” He had no idea why she was attacking him this way. To change the subject, he nodded to indicate the photos on Don’s nightstand. “I didn’t know he even had kids.”
“He doesn’t. They’re mine.”
“Yours?”
“When a man’s ill, he gets lonely. I thought it would be nice for him to have some pictures around. Men like to look at pictures of pretty girls. It gives them a boost.”
“I see.”
“Why do you keep saying that? What could you possibly see?” She picked up her cell phone, frowning as she checked for messages. “Where is she, anyway? She was supposed to get a ride. It’s not as if she’s so busy with after-school activities these days.”
He was damned if he was going to say “I see” again.
“And him—” She shook her head at the empty pillow, a boulder on the long trail of her preoccupations. “He’s a child. He doesn’t take care of himself. Never has. Vera said there’d be problems once he hit sixty, and she was right. What is it with men? Don’t they believe there’s such a thing as causes and effects?”
Oren smiled noncommittally. He’d have preferred to be included with the rest of his gender, but he wasn’t going to make a lot of noise about it.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m a bit frazzled at the moment. Do you mind if I just ask what you’re doing here? What you want?”
The question struck Oren as at once terribly simple and terribly complex. What did he want? He was tired and thirsty; his libido, after a brief flicker of wakefulness, had all but blown out. For some reason the only thing that came to mind at the moment, in the area of palpable desire, was the image of Teddy Hastings lounging in a hammock between tall trees, sipping a tall, cool ice-coffee drink, courtesy of the Carthage Union School District. Oren too hoped for a sabbatical someday. That fantasy got him through all the detentions, the parent conferences, the antidrug assemblies, the field trips, the Friday-night basketball games on cold, butt-flattening bleachers. And Vera—who was Vera? More shorthand. What he really needed, that is, what he actually wanted…
“I mean, this is strictly a formality, isn’t it? You have to come visit sick teachers in the hospital. It’s part of the job description, no? That’s why you’re here.”
“You could say that, yes.”
“Well, I’ve said it, so consider it done. You paid your little visit, now you can run on back to your little school, okay?”
“You sound a little angry.”
“Do I? Heavens to betsy, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Okay, she didn’t want him there, fine. He didn’t want him there either. And Don Blackburn? Whatever Don’s vote may have been was no longer relevant—he was upstairs, on a higher floor. So now Oren could go.
And yet, now that he’d been released from his errand at last, he found himself reluctant. It seemed important to mark his visit somehow, accomplish a little good. “Maybe there’s some way I can help.”
“That’s a lovely offer. It is. But honestly? Unless you’ve got medical rehabilitation training, no.”
“I meant, help you.”
“Me?”
“I mean if you want to talk things out. I do have some training, you know. I’ve got pretty close to a master’s in counseling.”
“Golly,” she said brightly. “Pretty close to a master’s. Wow.”
“Okay, forget it. Just trying to help.”
“No offense, Owen. But if you were me, would you talk to you?”
“It’s Oren. And to answer your question, I guess it would depend on the circumstances.”
“Circumstances,” she sighed. “Okay, let’s see. Circumstances. Try working for a firm that’s barely solvent, in a town that’s not too solvent either. Try coming home to a daughter who hates you, and a husband who’s been publically humiliated and won’t go out of the house. Try a cousin you’re at least twice removed from who gets hit by a stroke. He’s got an ex-wife who wants nothing to do with him and like no friends, so guess what, you’re the one elected to keep him company. You want to know how many New Yorker stories I’ve read him this week? How many op-eds from the Times? But the doctors say it’s important, the human voice. They need to hear it.” She spread out her hands and examined them like a map: the veins’ blue highways, the dry, knuckled mountains. “And then of course there’s the usual fun stuff. The migraines, the disk problems, the pre-ulcerative colitis. The more hot flashes than a microwave. So what do you think, Mr. Pretty Close to a Master’s. Given those circumstances, I mean. Would you talk to you?”
“Probably not.”
“There you go.”
Oren reflected on the photographs for a moment. “You’re Ted Hastings’s wife, aren’t you?”
At approximately this point she began to laugh, if you could call it laughing, the pained grimace her mouth was making, the subtle spasmodic trembling of the shoulders. In an experimental way he touched her arm; he was more perplexed than relieved when she failed to shake it off. He stood as if in a swoon, wishing himself gone.
“You were almost right by the way. About that minister thing.” He withdrew his hand. “I did go to seminary for a year. Rabbinical school.”
“Wait, was that before the pretty close to a master’s in counseling, or after?”
&nbs
p; “Before. I realize it must sound quaint, in this day and age. You probably don’t meet a lot of rabbis up here.”
“Oh,” she said, “I grew up Unitarian. I’m used to meeting rabbis.”
“I see. I mean, of course. Anyway yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Off the beaten track. Kind of interesting and scholarly.”
“So why did you quit?”
“I quit because I didn’t want to be a rabbi.”
She frowned. “This is getting too deep for me, I’m afraid.”
“I liked studying the stuff. Hanging out in the library, arguing over the nuances of some medieval commentary? That’s fun. But come on, writing sermons? Raising money for some temple? Standing in front of a congregation, telling people how to live? No thanks.”
Gail Hastings shook her head. “I don’t see the point of all that study if it’s not for something.”
“Oh, it was for something. I’m confident of that.” Oren looked out the window: the elongated shadows, the sun a pale, closing eye, colorless through the clouds. “But maybe I should leave you alone now.”
“Yes,” she said vaguely. Now she too seemed reluctant. She inclined her gaze to see him better. “Only tell me something first.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. You’re the almost-rabbi. Whatever you’ve got.”
“Well…” How do you like that? he thought. He was a man on a mission today after all. “There’s always prayer.”
She gave a depleted sigh.
“Hey, that’s no small thing.” He spoke in a loud voice; she seemed all of a sudden far away. “That’s really quite a lot, if you can manage it.”
“Can you?”
“No.”
“Look,” she said, “no offense, but most people I know, their lives are pretty chaotic. Do you really think following some outmoded commandments is the answer?”