James switched his blinker on and pulled into the Beth Israel Emergency Room lot. He put the truck in park.
“McKeen! What the hell are you doing?” Maurice yelled. “We’re taking him to the Brigham! Come on, man! I’ve got two fingers on ice back here.”
Maurice rarely got annoyed, but James could tell that he was bullshit, and rightly so. He would have been too.
Now it was half past four. They hadn’t had a break all afternoon. Maurice stood in a kitchen in Inman Square, in the home of a woman in her fifties who was having chest pains. A Filipino nurse helped him make a list of all the drugs she took, while a group of old people, mostly women, hovered over them as if watching a play. One of the two men in the group was younger than the rest, but he had the telltale signs of AIDS—the lesions on his skin, his collarbone jutting out, showing just how thin he was beneath his sweater. You saw a lot of guys like this in Cambridge the past couple years.
James remembered when Rock Hudson confirmed that he had the disease right before he died in 1985. He had never imagined that Hudson might be gay. “Do you think Doris Day knew?” his mother whispered when the news broke, and James and Sheila cracked up. But ever since, people were afraid. Sheila told him to be careful around blood, knowing how they never wore gloves in the truck, or did much of anything to protect themselves. It was a whole new mentality, and it hadn’t really taken hold in the EMT community. How could it, when most guys in his company saw it as a badge of honor to be walking around the hospital covered in blood? There was a saying: He who has the most blood on him at day’s end wins. You couldn’t change that mind-set overnight.
The apartment they stood in now was a big, bright penthouse with high ceilings. In a small bedroom off the hall, the nurse had half moved in, her suitcases lying open at the foot of the bed, clothes spilling out onto the carpet.
James stood with the firefighters in the larger bedroom next door, around a birdlike woman who was lying happily enough in her bed, wearing a silk dress and slippers. A woman of a similar age sat by her side, stroking her hand. A row of black-and-white head shots hung on the opposite wall, all of the same pretty, black-haired girl.
“That’s me, you know,” the patient said. “I was an actress. You boys are all too young to remember, but it’s true.”
“It’s true,” her friend echoed. “Jinx Murray. Look her up.”
“Jinx?” James asked.
“A sobriquet. Real name Angela Morris,” the bird-woman said. “The studios reinvented you back then.”
He couldn’t tell whether or not they were full of it. Her place was nice enough that she might have been a star. Then again, she could have just married money. James made a note of her name to tell his mother later. Jinx. That should be easy enough to remember.
“I had heart surgery two weeks ago,” she said. “You’ll need to take me to Mass General. My cardiologist is Dr. Warner.”
James eyed the meaty firefighters on the other side of the bed—they looked amusingly out of place here, among the delicate perfume bottles and pink lace curtains.
“Curley, will you help me get her on the stretcher?” he asked one of them. Curley nodded, and together they lifted her up and over. She felt like nothing, just air in James’s hands. He was afraid she might shatter.
They wheeled her down the hall and through a large living room, where the biggest Christmas tree he had ever seen loomed over a grand piano. The presents scattered beneath it had been wrapped so perfectly that the whole thing looked like a photograph in a magazine. James had offered to wrap the kids’ gifts this year, but Sheila had just laughed, as if tape and scissors were heavy machinery that he could never be trusted to operate.
They hadn’t gotten each other Christmas gifts in years. James was painfully familiar with the television ads for women’s jewelry that sprang up by the dozens at this time of year. The subtle subtext seemed to be: If you’re a real man, you’ll buy her some fucking earrings. In the past, he had wanted to, and it hurt that she knew him so well, all the worst and darkest parts of him. It was probably better back in the old days, when men handled the finances and wives didn’t have a clue what the family bank account contained. He couldn’t dazzle her, because no matter what he bought, when she looked into the box she’d see nothing besides the fact that he had just dug them a few hundred dollars deeper into the hole.
But this year James was determined to get her a new diamond. Connelly told him that you were supposed to spend two months’ salary now, or you’d look cheap. When James focused on it, it seemed like money wasn’t real, just an imaginary obstacle that he could think his way out of.
For weeks, he had weighed what he ought to do. The credit card wasn’t an option—seeing the charge on the monthly statement would put her over the edge and defeat the whole purpose of the thing. He thought about opening another card, one she wouldn’t know about, but that seemed deceitful. He considered crazy ideas: enrolling in medical testing trials, sperm donation (Sheila would have castrated him for even thinking about it, had she known). He listened to Dave Connelly’s brother tell a story about how after the Fore River Shipyard closed and he lost his job, he’d made tons of money doing some pyramid scheme. James gave some thought to that. But in the end, he had sold his father’s 1949 Ford Coupe Flathead V8.
Connelly had been giving him shit about the car for years. “This jalopy is straight out of Happy Days. I’m not getting in it,” he’d say, but he always got in and they always had fun driving that thing around.
The guy who bought the car off him looked like he had just stepped out of the early seventies, with muttonchops and huge, dark sunglasses. He said he was a collector. While he went to the bank to get cash, James sat in the driver’s seat for half an hour, breathing in deep, trying to keep some part of it for himself.
Connelly tried to make him feel better about the situation: “Hey, you know what FORD stands for? ‘Fix or Repair Daily.’ You know what FORD stands for? ‘Found on Roadside Dead.’ ”
When James thought about the fact that the car was no longer his—that come spring, he would not be driving along the coast, blasting the radio with the wind rushing by—he felt an almost sickening sense of loss. But there had been no other way. If he didn’t put his family ahead of himself, what sort of man was he?
By selling the car, he had guaranteed that Sheila wouldn’t have to worry about them paying anyone back. She could just be happy.
When he had picked the ring up from the jewelers a few days earlier, he had gone in full of excitement, but came out feeling deflated. He had it made to the exact specifications of the original, but it looked even smaller now, like a trinket you’d get out of a gumball machine. The guy on the other side of the counter had tried to persuade him to trade up—After this many years of marriage, a lot of men increase the size of the stone, he said. James couldn’t afford to, but after he saw the ring he wished he’d just gone ahead and done it anyway.
He wished he could bring Sheila and the boys to this penthouse, and that the four of them could move in and have it all—the nice furniture, the presents, the crackling fire.
The sick woman’s friends were concerned, but they also seemed excited by the surprise turn of events. One of them threw a mink coat over her bare legs with gusto.
“We’ll wait here for you!” she said. She pushed the nurse forward. “You go ahead with her.”
James and Maurice wheeled the stretcher into an elevator and rode down fifteen stories, with the firefighters packed in around them like sardines.
Outside, the snow fell in sheets, making it impossible to see anything more than a few feet away. He hoped Sheila wouldn’t try to go anyplace. Her Toyota had rear-wheel drive, a nightmare in a storm. The engine squealed and rattled whenever you started it in cold weather, and kept on squealing for several minutes. You had to let it warm up, or the car wouldn’t drive smoothly. But Sheila was never patient enough to wait.
Her sister Debbie drove a new Volvo these days.
> “It has an actual steel cage inside of it,” she had told Sheila on a recent visit. “I thought it was too expensive, but Drew said he can’t put a price on my safety.”
On the way to the hospital, the Filipino nurse rode up front with Maurice and cried softly. James wondered why she was crying—she had only known this woman for two weeks. Was she afraid of losing her job? Did her whole life depend on the health of the stranger in the next room? It must be an odd existence, living out your days in other people’s homes.
The patient was more matter-of-fact. “Call my son in D.C. when we get there, will you?” she instructed the nurse. “Let him know what’s up.”
James sat beside her and asked when her chest pains had started. “I was sitting at my piano,” she said. “I’d invited some friends from my acting days over for carols and eggnog. We were having a lovely time. And then, all of a sudden it was like an elephant was sitting on my chest.”
“How much eggnog did you have?”
“Not a drop! Doctor’s orders!”
“Did you eat anything spicy?”
“No,” she said. “And I’ve been taking all my medication.”
Maurice called the doctor for permission to give her nitro and start an IV.
“Open your mouth wide for me,” James said. He slipped the tablet under her tongue.
They passed through Kenmore Square. It looked like a ghost town in the snow. James wrapped a tourniquet around her upper arm before inserting the IV, in case she required meds before they reached the hospital.
“I was a student in the Boston University drama school just up the road here,” the woman said. “Faye Dunaway was a classmate of mine. We called her Done Fade-away. We all figured she’d be a flash in the pan. Looking back, I truly think a lot of us were more talented than her. She just wanted it the most.”
James nodded. Maybe the same could be said for him and his music career. Maybe he hadn’t wanted it enough. He considered saying this out loud, but stopped himself.
He was fairly certain that the Beatles had ruined his life. He was eleven when Meet the Beatles was released. His brother Bobby, four years older, bought the record the day it went on sale. James remembered sitting next to him, watching that first appearance on Ed Sullivan, feeling incredibly cool. His brother never wanted him around, and James held his breath, trying to blend into the sofa, afraid to break the spell. After “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Bobby turned to him transfixed, and said, “Holy shit. Right?”
“Right,” James said, nodding, amazed. To this day, he still thought of it as a profound moment.
He saved his allowance to buy Beatles trading cards and fan magazines, a sweatshirt and an egg cup. He spent three dollars on a Beatles wig at Woolworth’s, which he wore to school the next day, only to be sent home with a note from the principal.
When he was twelve years old and Bobby was sixteen, somehow their mother had gotten tickets to see the Beatles play at Boston Garden. You could barely hear the songs. Girls screamed so loud that they drowned out the sound. But that was it. James was hooked. The four of them just seemed so at ease, so happy and unassuming, like they had made this crazy dream come true and you could too.
A few years later, when he heard the news that Bobby had been drafted, James sat very still on his bed, trying to feel something. He knew it was evil, but in part he felt relieved—he imagined going through Bobby’s drawers without the fear of getting caught, stealing his records and his clothes and his cigarettes. His brother liked to beat up on him, and now James would be free of that. But at supper that night, when he saw that Bobby had shaved off his long greasy hair and sideburns, James felt it all at once: a sudden jolt of seriousness, an understanding that everything was about to change. He ran up to his room and slammed the door, putting Sgt. Pepper’s on the record player, and turning the volume up so high that the furniture shook.
No one had ever come along to replace the Beatles. Every time a new band got popular, even decades later, the highest compliment you could pay them was to call them “the next Beatles.” They remained the gold standard, the best that anyone could ever be.
His son Parker was an infant when John Lennon was killed. James would never forget that night. Sheila had taken the baby to her parents’. He was watching the Pats game at home by himself, when all of a sudden Howard Cosell said, “Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses.”
James could still recall the lump in his throat. If Cosell was saying that, then something huge and terrible must have occurred. But of all the tragedies he might have imagined, this he never could: “John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
He had always hated Howard Cosell. But after that night, even though the announcer had just been doing his job, James could barely stand to hear his voice. He only watched Monday Night Football with the volume turned down.
Sometimes when Sheila was at work, he’d take out his old guitar and play for the boys. Danny was still too young to care, but Parker loved Help! and Rubber Soul almost as much as James did. He was amazed with Parker’s pitch and his memory for lyrics—the kid was only seven and could do a version of “Yesterday” that would make you sob. James had taught him some chords on the guitar, and was impressed as hell to find that a week later Parker still remembered them.
Last Tuesday had been Parker’s school Christmas concert. James got a work swap for a Sunday shift to be there. Every kid had a solo—just a few words for the young ones. It was supposed to make them feel special and boost their self-esteem, though how you could feel special when everyone else got the exact same treatment, James wasn’t sure. Parker’s solo came at the very beginning of “Silent Night”: “All is calm, all is bright.” That was it. Six words, and James had felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He would do whatever it took to make sure his son became someone, instead of turning into just another loser with nothing to show for his big dreams.
“We’re gonna get him into music class,” James whispered to Sheila before the lights even came up.
“He already takes one at school,” she said.
“I’m talking about something better than that. He’s really got talent. I think he has what it takes.”
Sheila patted his hand. “Jimmy, calm down. He’s just a kid.”
The night of Christmas Eve was busier than he would have imagined in this weather. A boy had cracked his head open sledding into a tree; a young woman had swallowed a bottle of pills, which was common at this time of year. Another had gotten a Ping-Pong ball stuck in her ass while doing something sexual with her boyfriend, also fairly common.
They took the couple to Cambridge Hospital. Inside the ER, as Maurice signed off on the girl’s chart, James eyed the homeless guy they had dropped off early that morning through an opening in a curtain—he was curled up on top of the sheets in a narrow bed, wearing just a cloth hospital gown. He looked like a child, and James wanted to go to him. He wondered about the guy’s mother. Had he ever had a real Christmas morning, and if so did the memory of it make his life today better or worse?
“A Ping-Pong ball. Wow,” Maurice said when they left the ER.
“Yeah.”
They both started to laugh, and didn’t stop for about ten minutes.
Every ER in the city had a “butt box,” where the doctors kept various items that had once resided in someone’s ass. James had seen an X-ray of a beer bottle inside one guy, and a live mouse inside another. There was a process called the anal wink, which basically meant that once an object made it past the sphincter, it got vacuumed into the body and stayed there. None of these bozos ever seemed to have heard about the phenomenon until it happened to them.
James thought he would probably rather just go ahead and die than invite paramedics in to examine his sex life up close.
Last year, Sheila had suggested that th
ey try some role play to spice things up in the bedroom. Apparently, her girlfriend Kathy Dolan had tried it with her husband and raved.
When Sheila first mentioned the idea, James asked, “You mean, like, wear a nurse’s uniform?”
“Oh yeah. That’s what gets me hot, to dress up like a nurse, the way I do every day.”
“Well, I don’t know.” He was surprised by how bashful he felt. He liked that there could still be something about Sheila that made him feel nervous, unfamiliar.
She wanted to pretend he was a car mechanic and she was a high school cheerleader stranded on the side of the road. Apparently that was her big fantasy. He went with it. They had fun. Though now he would never ever let her take the car into the shop to get fixed.
As soon as he and Maurice got back in the truck, their tone came over the radio again.
“Jesus, is there no one else working in the entire city of Cambridge?” James said as he picked it up. “Nona, you’re killing me here.”
“Bad accident,” she said. “Car in the river off the Mass Ave Bridge. You’re going with Fire.”
They had to wait on the bridge while the fire department’s dive team pulled the patient from the water. According to his license, his name was Liam Stone. He lived in Somerville. Eighteen years old.
His face was shattered, his legs pointing in the wrong direction, his pelvis ripped open.
To the nurse who met them in the Mass General ER, James said, “Poor kid.”
She shrugged. “He was probably drunk, coming home from some Christmas party. He’s lucky he didn’t kill someone else.”
The Engagements Page 39