Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  Apparently I did. My father taught me how to bargain, and how to cut shady deals, like throwing in a decorative pillow with the purchase of a nineteenth-century chaise lounge, never mentioning that the pillow was on sale at IKEA for five bucks. He also showed me how to invent exciting stories for the furniture to make it more enticing.

  “Fred Astaire gave this Tiffany’s watch to Ginger Rogers in 1935 after filming the box office hit Top Hat. She wore it all her life.”

  We sold four watches with that story.

  I thought these little fibs were fun when I was a kid. But as I got older, I started to feel more and more uncomfortable conning unsuspecting old biddies and airheaded beach bunnies and gullible tycoons into buying my father’s furniture. Most of the stuff in the store would sell on its own merit; it was all very nice merchandise. But my father insisted on embellishing the truth to squeeze every nickel out of his customers.

  My mother did the bookkeeping for Pacific Antiques, which was a far cry from modeling the latest fashion in Milan. And for the first ten years of her marriage, she was always either pregnant or nursing. And then she was either tying shoes or making sack lunches or picking someone up from school and taking someone to swim practice and someone to dance rehearsal and someone to tennis and someone to debate club. It wasn’t until thirty years later that she finally had some room to breathe. And she looked around, and she saw that she hated her life.

  Luckily for her, my father died soon after that and left her enough money to remake her life the way she wanted it.

  In some ways, he was an excellent provider.

  His children’s children’s children, namely little Marilee Junior, and Joyce and Luanne, and Rajiv and Gokul, and Tinsley and Margaret, will want for nothing.

  And as far as I can tell, my father never actually “stole” a penny from anybody. I think the word I would use is “coerce.” The word my mother liked to use, after my father passed away, was “con.”

  There is no information on my father from before Franklin Brothers Used Cars & Parts. All that is known of his past is that he grew up in Minnesota, probably somewhere near Duluth, judging from the location of the warehouse where he kept several antique cars. His friend Rick from Minnesota came into our lives a total of two times that I can remember, the most recent of which was in 2020, when we contacted him to tell him of my father’s death and to give him first pick of the antique cars.

  The other time was when we went on a family vacation to Hawaii. Rick was living on Oahu, and I remember the whole family went out to dinner with him—I was eight—and Rick regaled us with stories of his travels to Thailand (I remember him saying he rode an elephant) and Egypt (he said he was hunting for lost treasure in ancient ruins, like Indiana Jones) and Peru (he explained that he owned an alpaca farm out that way). Now he was retired and learning how to surf.

  My mother asked him why he wasn’t married, and Rick said he had tried being married once, but it hadn’t worked out because his ex-wife wanted to stay in one place, and Rick always wanted to go, go, go!

  Then my mother told us it was time for bed, and she took us home, and my father stayed behind with Rick to shoot the shit.

  I remember waking up the next morning and finding the hotel room filled with all sorts of curious knickknacks (I specifically remember a golden monkey from Tibet), gifts from Rick, my dad said. We shipped everything back to Malibu and marketed the collection as the exotic spoils of a notorious treasure hunter.

  I think that time we were telling the truth.

  CHAPTER 17

  ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 10, 2011, almost a month after my last delivery for Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., I was smoking Courtney Love and flipping through the channels on my TV when news broke of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan. I was pretty baked, so I ditched Ann Curry for a Mortal Kombat movie instead.

  When I woke up the next morning, the whole east coast of Japan had been wiped out by a thirty-foot tsunami. Thousands of people were dead or missing. Whole coastal communities had been swept out to sea. Nuclear power plants were underwater and spreading their poison far and wide.

  In other words: pandemonium.

  Video footage uploaded to YouTube showed a wall of water advancing inland, swallowing up cars and houses and trees and cattle and tiny screaming people. It looked like what happens to ants when you turn on the faucet in the sink.

  Glub-glub!

  I spent the morning glued to the TV. Every hour brought new breaking news of death and destruction.

  Then my phone rang. The number was blocked.

  “Jim,” said the caller.

  The line was crackling, and I couldn’t make out the voice.

  “Jim,” repeated the voice, “it’s Marilee.”

  “Marilee!” I cried. “How have you been?”

  “Jim, I’m going to Japan.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “They need volunteers—” she began, but then there was a thud and the hiss of static, and I thought I’d lost the connection.

  “Jim? You still there?” She was back. “Sorry, I dropped the phone.”

  “Mare, there’s no way you’re going to get into Japan right now,” I said. “The airport is underwater.”

  “I’m flying out with the Red Cross tonight,” she said. “It’s all arranged. I want to give you the number of the church where I’m staying—so you can reach me.”

  I copied the number down on a Post-it and stuck it to the fridge.

  “Jim,” she began, and then another thud. There was a scuffle on the other end of the line, and then “Jim? Sorry, dropped the phone again.”

  “You’re overworked.”

  “Nah,” she said, “just distracted.”

  “Mare, please be careful over there.”

  “Tell Mom, will you?” she said. “And the others?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Then I thought of something. “Mare, before you go—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your lawyer, that guy I dealt with when we were selling your art. He called the other day and left a message for me saying he was sending something over in the mail, something important, and that I should look it over and get back to him right away. You have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Mare, you still there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s probably just some legal stuff. Look, Jim, I have to go. We can talk about it later, okay? You know how to reach me! I love you gobs and oodles, oodles and gobs.”

  Click.

  The media followed my sister to Japan. “Local Humanitarian Joins Rescue Efforts,” said the Chronicle. CNN aired footage of a Red Cross helicopter setting down in Tateyama and my sister climbing from the cabin to a welcoming committee of blue-haired nuns. The news crawl read, “Sister Marilee Lorenzo arrives in Tateyama. Red Cross relief efforts under way.” The New York Times took a little more liberty: “Sister Marilee Lorenzo: Angel of Mercy.”

  A few days later, a large manila envelope arrived in the mail. At first I thought it was another assignment from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., but then I noticed the return address, The Legal Offices of Oliver Sykes, my sister’s attorney.

  The envelope contained a twenty-page document that read like War and Peace.

  In the event that UNDERSIGNED should become incapacitated and unable to make decisions regarding health care, as determined by a licensed medical professional, JIM LORENZO FROST, brother of UNDERSIGNED, shall be given power of attorney, and therein shall act as AGENT, making all decisions on behalf of UNDERSIGNED until time of death, whereupon all assets belonging to UNDERSIGNED will be liquidated and the proceeds bequeathed to said TRUST, to be overseen by aforementioned COMMITTEE.

  Et cetera, et cetera.

  It was a living will making provisions for Marilee’s death and naming me as her guardian in the event she should become too ill to care for herself.

  Wh
y the hell would my twenty-five-year-old sister need a living will?

  There was a note from Oliver Sykes, which said, “Look over the following documents and let me know if you have any questions. When you have read the documents, please initial and sign under AGENT, and return to my office ASAP.”

  Like hell I was going to sign anything like that. It was too morbid to even think about. Better to pretend I’d never seen it.

  As my mother used to say, “Don’t give the devil any ideas.”

  I wasn’t around to take Oliver Sykes’s next call, or the next, or the next. I was on a flight bound for Paris. Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. had another job for me. I was assigned to pick up a package at the Café Père Tranquille at 16 rue Pierre Lescot, Paris, France, at eighteen hundred hours on March 15, 2011.

  My flight got in at four o’clock, and it was almost five by the time I reached the train station. I took the RER B line to Les Halles, about a thirty-minute commute. The train was full of dour-faced Parisians with impassive expressions and pouty upper lips. I tried making conversation with the guy sitting across from me on the train, but he shook his head and said something in French that I understood to mean he didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t care to speak, English.

  I had taken a couple of French lessons from iTunes since my last visit. Something about the woman in Luxembourg Gardens, something about how she spoke English so well, although she was clearly a native French speaker, something about her lingual dexterity had inspired me to try my hand at another language.

  Or maybe it was just something about her.

  I knew a few key phrases, like “Where is the fill-in-the-blank” and “Excuse me, sir” and “Sorry, madame” and “Thank you, miss” and “May I order a fill-in-the-blank, please?”

  Ouais, je savais un petit quelque chose.

  I’ll say one thing, French was sure as hell a lot easier than Korean.

  “Oú est le Café Père Tranquille,” I so deftly asked a gentleman standing at the top of the stairs as I exited the metro station.

  “Tout droit, sur la droite,” the man said.

  “Merci beaucoup,” I said.

  Foot traffic in Paris is about as bad as rush hour traffic in Los Angeles. I found myself weaving and swerving around old ladies and pushcarts and strollers. Once or twice I found myself in a head-on collision with an oncoming stranger.

  It was “Pardon, excusez-moi, pardon, pardonnez-moi” all the way there.

  The café was a corner joint with wicker chairs and tables-pour-deux spilling out onto the sidewalk and into the street. The ground floor was encased in floor-to-ceiling mirrors, cracked and yellowed, giving it the look of a carnival funhouse. I took a seat just inside, by a tall window facing the street, and ordered a coffee that cost something like five euros.

  There was a woman sitting at the next table over stroking a black cat in her lap. The cat was purring loudly. The woman was reading a newspaper. The front page had a picture of a nuclear plant in Japan standing knee-deep in water. I couldn’t read the headline, but I understood the word Évacuation, which was smeared all over the article like spots on a Dalmatian.

  I sipped my coffee, waiting for someone with a red cooler to appear—hoping for the woman from Luxembourg Gardens to appear.

  I sat there for twenty minutes, growing impatient. I ordered another coffee and then asked for directions to the bathroom.

  The waiter pointed to a staircase I hadn’t noticed before. I ascended the stairs and discovered a second floor, this one carpeted, and speckled with red upholstered chairs and black leather couches. The walls were lined with shelves of yellowed books, black-and-white photos of cityscapes, and large box windows affording views of the outdoor mall and gardens of Les Halles.

  And there she was! The woman from the garden. This time she was in a pair of Levi’s jeans and a white blouse, Tom’s slip-ons, with a small onyx gem on a silver chain around her neck. A beige pea coat and matching plaid scarf were draped over her chair. She was sipping something that looked like steamed milk, which I later learned was a vanille lait chaud, her favorite drink, and she was reading a new book, this one in English, The Anastasia Syndrome by Mary Higgins Clark.

  I asked the waiter to bring my order upstairs and took a seat across from the woman. She looked up at me. Her eyes were sea green.

  “Late again,” she said.

  “Peut-être,” I tried.

  “Not maybe,” she countered. “Twenty minutes by my watch.”

  “I still have plenty of time by mine,” I joked, showing her my watch, which still read 10:20 a.m. Pacific standard time.

  She didn’t smile, but her face relaxed a little. She stirred some sugar into her drink and took a sip.

  “You found the place okay?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s nice.”

  “And your flight was pleasant?”

  “I slept like a baby.”

  “And you fly back tonight?”

  “I don’t have to.” I grinned.

  Her eyes flashed. She took a few coins from her purse and slammed them on the table.

  “Here is the cooler,” she said, kicking it across the floor. “Good night.”

  “Wait!” I said as she struggled to get into her coat. “Won’t you have dinner with me?”

  “This is a business meeting, not a pleasure cruise, Mr. Frost,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to get her right arm into her left sleeve.

  She knew my name!

  “You invite me to this lovely little café,” I said, “I come all the way over from California, and you won’t stay for dinner?”

  She had squeezed into her coat, and now she was furiously wrapping her scarf around her neck, looping and looping and looping, like she was trying to hang herself.

  “You got me,” she spat. “I was trying to seduce you.”

  “Come on,” I pleaded. “I just spent twelve hours on a plane. I’m starving. At least stick around to help me figure out the menu.”

  “Order yourself a bullshit sandwich,” she said, and she was gone.

  She had escaped me again. I felt a little piece of me double over. I didn’t even know her name, and for all I knew, I would never see her again.

  A waiter came over and asked me if I would like anything else. What the hell, I thought, I’m not going to let some woman ruin Paris for me.

  I ordered the first thing on the menu, the croque-monsieur, which was just an open-face ham and cheese sandwich. It came with fries and a salad. I stuffed myself silly, and then I ordered the tarte tatin for dessert, and a Perrier to wash it down.

  I asked the waiter if there was anything of interest nearby, and he pointed me in the direction of Notre Dame. It was about a twenty-minute walk. It started to rain a little, but I didn’t mind, and it only lasted a few minutes before the clouds opened up to reveal the stars.

  I traversed the Pont Notre Dame to the serenade of a brass band doing an upbeat rendition of “Make Someone Happy.” The musicians were kids, probably no older than seventeen or eighteen, drinking wine and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

  I found myself staring up at the grandiose towers of Notre Dame, wondering if Quasimodo was up there now, and thinking that my chances with the woman at Père Tranquille were about as good as Quasimodo’s chances with the gypsy Esmeralda. And then I found myself thinking of my sister and hoping that she would someday take time off from her do-gooding, enough to visit Paris and see Notre Dame glistening in the rain, looming above the Seine. This cathedral, this holy place, this hallowed hall, this monument to God wasn’t for an atheist like me, I thought; it was for Marilee.

  I didn’t have a camera, and even if I did, a picture wouldn’t do the reality of the thing justice, and it certainly wouldn’t bring Marilee home from Japan, I thought.

  I crossed the Petit Pont to the Latin Quarter and found the nearest metro station. I rode the RER C to Champ de Mars and emerged in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, which was ablaze with sparkling lights th
at came to life every hour, on the hour, like a cuckoo clock. It was like seeing Godzilla or King Kong. It was so massive, so dazzling, so imperious.

  I wandered into the Parc du Champ de Mars, a long green carpet laid out at the feet of the Eiffel Tower. There were couples huddling together on blankets, and gaggles of university kids sharing bottles of wine.

  I sat cross-legged in the grass, and a posse of hipsters offered me a joint and something to drink. I think it was whiskey. I accepted, and there I sat for a long time, puffing away and staring at some lucky bastard’s gift to mankind.

  Magnum Opus.

  At about midnight it started to rain. Everyone in the park scattered, and I thought of Japan, and my sister, and everything she had done, which I had to admit, all seemed so futile to me in that moment.

  I caught the last train back to the airport and managed to squeeze onto a direct flight back to California. I slept the whole way home.

  When I woke up, we were circling over San Francisco. From my cabin window, I could just barely make out the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking through a layer of white fog. Some other lucky bastard’s gift to mankind.

  Magnum Opus.

  CHAPTER 18

  AIR TRAVEL isn’t what it used to be. Yesterday’s flight to New York was nearly empty. There were maybe fifty people on a plane built for two hundred. When gas prices skyrocketed in the thirties, so did the price of a plane ticket.

  Fortunately, I can afford to fly, and so can my children, and their children, thanks in part to my dear old dad. But most of today’s children will never travel so far as a few hundred miles from the place of their birth, at least that’s what a recent study in the Economist said.

  And here I am in New York, two thousand miles from my house on Gough Street.

  I wonder if old Eleanor Summerland, the widow of Lafayette Park, misses me.