by John Updike
"Moods?" Nelson asks.
"Depressed, irritable, could't sleep. Weekends I'd be so beat and bored I'd pray for an emergency to call. Tooth-structure loss I could handle. Wives," he goes on. "They shut down without even knowing they're doing it. The fancy stuff goes and then even the basics are cut back to once a week, then twice a month, and then just holidays and trips abroad. Portugal, Austria, Acapulco-all that way just to get a little nooky from my lawful wedded."
"Well, in my case," Nelson begins, but Billy overrides him: "And then when you suggest maybe this marriage isn't working, they act stunned and tell their lawyers to go for all they can get, this isn't their idea."
Years of dealing with people with their mouths immobilized has made Billy an easy conversational partner, needing very little prompting. "Yelling out in your sleep?" Nelson asks.
The waitress, who looks just a little like the sweaty olive-skinned beauty in the Secret Platinum commercial, interrupts with the day's specials. Billy orders bowties with diced shrimp, and Nelson the mushroom ravioli. Both decline wine in favor of water. "Have the sparkling Pellegrino, it's hyper expensive," Billy says. "This is on me, remember." He tells Nelson, "Yeah, awful dreams. In one of them I'm crammed into the trunk of a car, my face right up against the jack, and I can see the car-you know how in dreams you can see things from inside and out both-being slid into a river, like that mother did to those kids in South Carolina years ago. In another dream I'm in one place and my house is burning in another, and I can't get to it, even though I can see the flames burning through the floor right at my feet." He pauses. "So-what do you think?"
So-this is why he's asked Nelson to lunch, to get free therapy. It wasn't just those good old days tenting out in the back yard. Nelson grudges being a wise man outside the treatment center. He says, "We don't do dreams much in therapy any more. There's no time. The insurance companies want fast action-in because of some crisis, 'Here, take these pills,' out. The second dream, though, has an obvious reference. The night I was staying over at your apartment with your mother and puppy and our house burned down in Penn Villas a mile away."
Billy puffs his lips out suspiciously, and his eyes pop a little, too. "When was that? How old were we?"
"Twelve, maybe you were thirteen. Are you serious, you've forgotten it?"
"Well, when you mention it, it kind of comes back, but as a news item mostly. Listen, Nelson. Forget the dreams. I have attacks in the middle of the day. I break out in a sweat like I'm on a treadmill, I can feel my heart doing double time. I think about death, about being sealed in a little lead box and the whole universe going on, rotating, exploding, whatever the hell all it does, on and on and eventually pooping out while I'm still in there, totally forgotten. I'm going to die, I can't get it out of my head. You have to wear these latex gloves now and I have the fantasy a little drop of blood is going to seep through from some gay guy's gums and give me AIDS. All it takes is one little drop from a micro-abrasion. It's taking the pleasure out of doing implants."
Nelson has to laugh, his old friend is so self-obsessed, so solemn in his mental misery. Does he want his fingernails, his nostril-hairs, to last forever? "By our age, Billy, we should have come to terms with this stuff."
"Have you?"
"I think so. It's like a nap, only you don't wake up and have to find your shoes." He is being hard-hearted; there is agony here, even if Billy is a comical old friend. Not only are his lips fat, his nose has gotten fat; it sits there in the middle of his face like something added, its flesh faintly off-color. Nelson advises, more compassionately, "Believe in God and the afterlife if that would help. There's some evidence-people who've gone through an NDE are absolutely convinced and can hardly wait to get back to the other side."
"God," Billy sneers. "How can you believe in God after the Holocaust? What did God do to help my mother? They cut off her tits and she still died."
Nelson remembers Mrs. Fosnacht, her helpless outward-turned eye, her wide-open look and big friendly untidy body with a slip usually showing and shoes that bulged at the sides as if they hurt. She had been nice; she had thought Nelson was a good influence on Billy. "Anxiety disorders," he offers, "level off, usually. The human organism gets tired of sustaining them and finds a distraction."
"Nellie, I can't do tunnels. I'm not that crazy about bridges, either, especially the Running Horse, the way it arches up. But how can I go to conferences in New York if I can't do a tunnel? I have to go all the way up to Fort Lee and sweat it out on the George Washington."
"You're lucky," Nelson tells him. "There aren't any tunnels around Brewer."
"No, but there are underpasses. I have to force myself to drive through that one at Eisenhower and Seventh. I have zero tolerance for being enclosed. Even here, you notice, I had to get the chair nearer the exit. Airplanes-I haven't been on one since Moira and I split up. They're tin tunnels that go five miles high."
"How did you handle these fears," Nelson asks, "when you were married?"
Billy lifts his hands, superclean and with wrinkled tips from being so much in latex gloves, to let the waitress put his mound of bowties and diced shrimp in front of him. "Shoshana," he answers, "was kind of jittery herself, and I was the stabilizer. With Moira, like I said, we flew all these places to get her to put out, and I would take a couple of stiff belts in the airport lounge."
The waitress sets down Nelson's hot ravioli, the steam fragrant of mushrooms, of secretive gray-black fungoid growth, of damp earth, of greenhouses.
Billy talks on: "Maybe I was too young in my married period to think I was really going to die. I mean really, totally-zip-zero. You will be nada. I can't eat." He puts his fork down.
Nelson picks up his own fork, saying, "It's a concept the mind isn't constructed to accept. So stop trying to force it to. Come on, eat. Enjoy. Have I told you, Billy, I've discovered I have a sister? No, I'm not kidding."
Christmas for Nelson feels least phony at the Center. These unsettled psyches and unwashed bodies, burdens to society and to their families, who in many cases have abandoned them to a life of shelters and halfway houses, respond to the dim old tale-the homeless couple tainted by a mysterious pregnancy, the child born amid straw and dung, the secret splendor sensed by shepherds and donkeys and oxen standing mute in their stalls. Glenn, he of the blue eyelids and glittering nostril-stud, can play the piano, a skill left over from a closeted adolescence; he extracts the sturdy standard carols from the out-of-tune upright's keyboard while obese Shirley displays a small silvery voice and Dr. Howard Wu a brassy, enthusiastic baritone. The doctor's joining in, with Esther Bloom a conspicuous good sport beside him, singing the Christian words, emboldens the clients: the substance-dependent and delusional, the phobic and borderline, Rosa with her new friend the compulsive nail-biter, whose name is Josephine Foote, and Jim the lusty, swag-bellied addict, who belts out every first line from memory, but then his brain lets go. Nelson is pleased to see Michael DiLorenzo here, letting his cool be thawed, sharing a song sheet with little black Bethleen, a bipolar. The boy's lips move but his ale-dark eyes beneath their handsome brows are elsewhere, muddled and shuttling out of rhythm; he has not shaved this morning, which Nelson takes as a good sign, that his mother's nagging is letting up. All in their ragged fashion get with it, taking comfort in the organized noise, the approach to melodic unison, the illusion of a happy family here before the tree crammed with artifacts produced in Andrea's art sessions. There are cookies and cake and ice cream after the sing, and little presents from the staff, all bought at Discount Office Supplies-phallic four-color ballpoint pens for the men and vaginal pocket diaries for the women. In turn there filters up from the clients to this and that staff member shy tokens, enigmatic thanks for care given. Nelson receives from Josephine an intricate collage, mounted on a lacquered black board, of smiling faces cut from magazine advertisements and arranged, bodiless, as thick as flowers in a bouquet. Or is it more of a snowflake scissored together of smiles? Dr. Wu receives a pagoda ma
de of matchsticks, and a lumpy arch of colored clays which Jim explains is a rainbow, pointing to the "pot" at one end. Everyone, onlooking, laughs. The basement floods with the warm faith that the world beyond these old elementary-school walls is friendly, remembers them, wants them to be well and to rejoice.
This is Christmas Eve, a Friday. Next day, Christmas at Mom and Ronnie's seems perfunctory. Nelson drives over to Mt. Judge in the morning, retrieving the Corolla from the curb on Almond Street, where it sits parked for days. The 7-Eleven is open, even as children are opening the presents brought by an omniscient, omnipresent Santa Claus. Weiser Square and the city park are deserted but for a blowing plastic bag and a vagrant stooped pedestrian studying his shadow on this wanly sunny holy day. The mall before the viaduct is a dead-empty lake of striped asphalt. GREEN MILE TOY II ANNA KING GALAX QUEST.
Mom is hard to give to and always was. He used to give her candy, knowing she'd right away let him share it. As he got older his mind had to keep darting away from dainty things, underwear and stockings for her legs that he knew she was proud of. In his childhood they were held up with garters attached to a girdle and had darker widths at the top that were stirring to glimpse. Pantyhose on the other hand had that darker patch in the crotch, shaped like a big lima bean. Once in his teens he gave her some L'eggs and even they, pulled filmy from their egg-shaped containers, made him blush. This year he is strapped-eighty-five a week for his room, three sixty a month to Pru as child support, extras like the mini-fridge he bought to keep his milk from going sour don't leave much from a weekly salary hardly four C's after everybody's tax bite-so he settles on a dozen Top-Flites for Ronnie, even though Dad always said he had a sledge-hammer swing, and for Mom a Better Your Bridge computer program, imagining her up there using the machine in the little room that used to be Mom-mom Springer's sewing room. But Ronnie says, here in this living room where everything has been pushed around to make room for the Christmas tree, that he doesn't want to risk overloading his hardware and crashing the whole memory with all his financial records in it, back to the Seventies.
To ease this rejection, Mom says, "Honestly, Nelson, I doubt if I could use the program, it looks too complicated, I have trouble following even what Doris explains to me, so patiently every time."
"All right, I'll take it back," he snaps, "and get you something else. How about a sexy nightie?" To him she has given flannel pajamas and a cable-knit maroon sweater, as if to keep him warm away from her presence.
Ronnie has come up with a strange gift, some kind of a needle:
The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama and an American doctor. Nelson is startled because, in unwrapping, the saintly Asian on the jacket at first peek suggests his late father, not so much physically as in the aura of sly alertness, a tentative tricky lovable something in the guarded smile. Ron explains, in his insurance-selling voice, "I thought since you disdain the Christian religion maybe something along other lines would appeal to you. It's very important, Nelson, to have a spiritual outlet in our lives. There's a tremendous, worldwide upwelling of spirituality to greet the new millennium."
He sounds like he's quoting somebody. Nelson checks the book for any mark to indicate it had been remaindered, and sees none. Ronnie paid full price for this odd gift. "The Dalai Lama," Nelson says. How kindly the tentative, watchful face, in its tinted square glasses, smiles out at him: a father he might have had. "Thanks, Ron," he says. "I'll look into it during my lonely nights." Maybe it's a peace offering but there's no need; after that phone conversation after the Thanksgiving blow-up Nelson feels right with Ron, as right as he'll ever get. Ron is just one more or less well-meaning American bozo, balling Mom or not. Once the testosterone goes, you're left with a limp and a spiritual outlet.
He wants to get out of the house before Ron Junior and Margie and the three kids arrive for the midday feast. He's feasted enough with these people for one year. Alex is staying in Virginia with his broken family but Georgie is coming over from New York on the Bieber bus. Ron and Mom tell Nelson again he would be more than welcome to stay, they'll set another place, but after Thanksgiving he knows that wherever he's at home it's not with his stepbrothers.
At the door, his mother says, "Oh, I nearly forgot. Some woman called early this morning. That Esther who runs your clinic. I said to her, didn't she know this was Christmas morning? She said she did, but she'd like you to call her nevertheless. She was quite short with me; these Jews are so touchy."
"I can't imagine why. I'll call her from my place. Thanks, Mom. Merry Christmas. My love to all those other Harrisons." He kisses her little dry cheek and thinks how she seems to be shrivelling. Osteoporosis, like they keep advertising on television. Everything leaches our bones. The neighbor couple are out in the side yard with their boy and his new, red-runnered sled, though there's not a flake of snow on the grass. The sun makes all the decorations on the way back to Brewer, all the lights and tinsel and the plastic Santa Clauses and red-nosed reindeer, look washed-out, leached of joy. He stops at the 7-Eleven and picks up a frozen shepherd's pie and coffee in a seasonal plastic cup with a holly-leaf-and-berry pattern. They make pretty good coffee, actually. Drawing on his slender social-work Spanish, he says "Feliz Navidad" to the frizzy-haired girl behind the counter. She responds with a smile, dazzling in her dusky face, and a ribbon of responding Spanish of which Nelson only understands "Muchath graciath, theňor, "the "s"s thickened by her tongue-stud.
Back in his room, Nelson sips the coffee and dials Esther's home number. He gets the husband-a mellifluous, condescending, lawyerly voice. He is rich; Esther doesn't need the money; she runs the Center because she loves mankind. When she comes on she sounds subdued, even shaky. "Nelson, I thought you should know, since you worked with the DiLorenzo boy."
"Know what?" But the flutter of premonition has already risen in his chest. He just saw Michael yesterday, at the fringe of the crowd around the piano, trying to join in. He had wished him a happy holiday. The boy had responded, "O.K., sir," and looked away. He had neglected to shave. But he had begun to participate in groups, overcoming his distaste for the other clients. He wanted to get better.
"He committed suicide. In the night. They found him this morning. DiLorenzo himself called the Center. He was in shock but talked about suing us and Birkits."
That inner space where he had once felt a knife sliding as he tried to empathize with Michael turns more slippery; Nelson feels he is reaching down to bring something back but his hands are soapy and he cannot bring it back, it sinks. You will be nada. "Oh my God," he tells Esther. "No. How did he do it?"
"With a plastic suit-bag. Tied around his neck with a necktie. Sending his parents some kind of message, you could theorize. 'You want dry-cleaning, here's dry-cleaning.'"
"We lost him. I feel I lost him."
"Nelson, don't be egotistical. We do our best, but we can't do it all. I just wanted you to hear about Michael before it's in the Sunday papers. Everybody uses Perfect; it'll be news." She is brave and crisp but her Center has taken a blow, a black mark.
"How serious do you think the father was about suing?"
"Who knows? The man is a doer, he needs to act."
"He kept an appointment with us the day of the hurricane. He trusted us. I should have spotted something, I did drop a note to Howie about the meds. The Trilafon wasn't quieting the voices."
"Don't do this to yourself, Nelson. It is not your fault."
That's what they all say. That's what he said to them. But when she hangs up the boy is still dead. Sealed under black glass, gliding feet first to nowhere. Nelson pictures Mrs. DiLorenzo lying in a darkened room, the daughters flying in from their disrupted Christmases, the girlishly handsome young face smeared on the inside of an adhesive bubble like an astronaut's helmet. The strength it must take not to rip the smothering plastic with your fingernails, the furious determination to smother the voices and silence their obscenities.
He feels too sick, too sunk, to eat. He needs to call someb
ody, but Annabelle is in Las Vegas and Pru is in Ohio and should be allowed to have her Christmas with their children and her family. Mom is entertaining her born-again step-children by now. Celebration has stifled all but a little of the traffic noise that usually permeates the city, though out on Eisenhower Avenue a few scoffers and loners roar by. The end of this very short day has begun to darken his windows before he has the heart to microwave the shepherd's pie and turn on the Oahu Bowl. Hawaii beats Oregon, twenty-three to seventeen, and on the six-o'clock news Jerry Seinfeld has married at last, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in working order, and some Sikhs have hijacked an Indian plane for no clear reason and are jerking it all around the sky. Michael DiLorenzo is not mentioned. He is strictly local news.
"Hi. You're back. How was Las Vegas?"
"Nelson, it was a blast. It's the future or something. My girlfriend and her husband talked me into gambling and I won two hundred dollars one night and lost it the next, of course."
"I bet you didn't call my aunt Mim."
"Well-surprise, surprise-I did, and she couldn't have been sweeter, or funnier. She remembered my mother dimly, from some encounter in a bar that used to be down on Running Horse Street, and had a lot to say about my father. Our father."
"Yeah? What?"
"Oh, what a caring older brother he was, and how hard he worked to perfect his basketball skills. I mean, it didn't just come to him naturally. And how supportive and non-judgmental he always was of her, even after she became a hooker."
"She said that?"
"Sure, why not? She said my mother was never a real hooker, because she wasn't organized in her approach. She even got us into O, at the Cirque du Soleil, if that's how you pronounce it. It beats anything you could ever see in New York-underwater ballet and bungee jumpers and a boat that rises right up into the air! I was absolutely riveted."