Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  Outside, waiting for the limousine to the graveyard, she and Solly are thronged. Everyone seems to want to touch them as if they are, for the moment, anointed. In a long black dress, Lucinda Wylie sweeps through the crowd (does she walk above the crowd? No, not now that Matt is dead), her hair rolled into a dark chignon studded with jet beads, her arms ringed with large ebony and silver bracelets. Lucinda takes both of Ann’s hands, and the ebony and silver bracelets make musical sounds as they knock against each other—a wooden clacker, a triangle.

  A young woman with blue eyes and bright-brown hair in a simple brown sweater and skirt comes over and Solly introduces her to his mother as Gina Pappadopolis, Stuy graduate, freshman at Yale. Gina takes Ann’s hand gravely. Solly introduces his mother to Gina’s parents, a heavyset grim-looking man in an olive suit and a blue-eyed woman in a gray dress who carries a black patent-leather pocketbook. There is a carefulness in the way Solly pronounces their names and brings their hands to Ann’s. He stands up very straight and even his gold earring seems subdued and respectful, almost antique.

  At the cemetery the rabbi intones in Hebrew and then in English that the Lord is great and good and that His name is sanctified forever throughout the world, which He has created according to His will. Everyone present throws some dirt down onto the coffin. Solly shovels and shovels and fills up the rest of the grave himself while everyone waits, although it takes Solly close to half an hour and the rabbi looks angry and Solly gets a blister on the palm of his hand; his uncle Adam ties his handkerchief around Solly’s torn skin.

  Among the condolence letters is an autopsy report. Do families routinely receive a copy? Perhaps it arrives because she is a physician.

  The body is that of a cachectic male with alopecia, with multiple petechiae over his abdomen, bilateral thighs … Stomach: Reveals multiple ulcerated areas with pale centers rimmed in dark red … Kidneys: Right and left appear pale, with multiple hemorrhagic foci … Examination of the abdomen: Reveals 2,750 ml of serous peritoneal fluid.

  She quits reading and considers ripping up the report, but cannot bear to throw away anything having to do with Matt.

  Leaving her office one day at dusk, she sees Matt walking home ahead of her. He has that spring in his step—she quickens her step to catch up with him—and he is carry-ing his worn brown-leather briefcase stuffed with papers and he is wearing that new suit, the navy-blue one, which Solly returned to Nordstrom’s.

  On New Year’s Day, 2003, Ann goes downtown by subway, then starts walking the few blocks toward the former site of the World Trade Center. The streets are full of tourists all moving in the same direction. It is cold and windy and there is a light snow on the ground. They pass City Hall, many closed office buildings, Trinity Church where a service seems to be going on—Ann hears the thick orotund sounds of organ music. Hot dog vendors are doing a robust business, and she buys a dog with sauerkraut, heavy on the mustard. Despite the mushy roll, she likes the feel of the warm food in her mouth and belly. Sightseers mill around the jerry-built wooden walls that surround the site. Faded paper flowers festoon the walls, and also worn taped-on photographs of this young girl and that older man and this middle-aged couple, all with their different skin colors and dates of birth, and always the same date of death. She joins a line of people and, as she waits to advance to the lookout area, pulls her scarf up over her cold nose and chin and kneads her gloved fists against each other—she is pleased that she has not gotten mustard on her gloves.

  Finally she is at the front of the line and it is her turn to look through the small square opening. At first she makes out nothing but swirling dust and snow far below in the distance. Pressing her forehead against the cold plastic window doesn’t help: her breathing fogs it up and she has to clean it off with her glove. Slowly she realizes that she is looking out into a huge hole the sides of which she can’t discern. As she squints, she spots a few yellow construction trucks, dwarf sized, down at the bottom of the pit. Nothing else. It is as if she were looking at an abandoned planet where the soil is eroded and a sandstorm is in progress.

  She tries to call up dancing with Matt at Windows on the World, looking out at the city from their lamplit table. They spent every anniversary there, for twenty years. But nothing comes to her. She looks down at the hole, which is all she sees. Behind her, someone yells out, “Hey up there, get a move on! It’s cold as a witch’s teat!” She continues to look down, and still the towers do not reappear.

  NIGHT CALL

  The answering service phoned him at two o’clock in the morning. A woman named Rose Petrovich or Petrush, the operator hadn’t caught the name exactly, had called. It was an emergency, a death.

  “A death? Who’s this message for? I’m Dan Dorenbusch, the obstetrician. The gynecologist.” In the dark, he ran though a mental list of his patients, all stable. Dan fumbled with his penlight, shook it until the batteries made contact and the minuscule light went on. Beside him his sleeping wife mumbled something, turned away, drifted to the far side of the bed. Still half asleep himself, he took down the area code—a New Jersey area code—and phone number, and hung up. Maybe the caller wanted his father, who was a pediatrician in East Orange.

  Almost before Dan finished dialing the number, a woman was whispering and sobbing into the telephone, words and wails and a sputtering sound of s’s tumbling over each other like roiling water. “He’s dead. He’s dead. Your father’s dead.”

  “Who is this?” he whispered. “What are you talking about?” He strained to hear as though there were static on the line.

  “Your father’s dead! Sam’s dead! Can you come here? Please! My son’s asleep downstairs.”

  “What? What? Who are you? What is this?”

  “It’s Rosemarie. Rosemarie Petrowski, your father’s receptionist, his nurse. Sam’s dead!”

  Dan had an urge to cry April Fools! and laugh uproariously, except it was July. Cut the crap, he wanted to insist, and put my mother on the phone. Although he knew very well that the number he had called was not his parents’, he imagined the nurse setting the telephone down on the familiar hall table and walking through his parents’ large dark house to wake his mother. Go on, go get her, he wanted to shout. But he sat in silence watching the fluorescent second hand slowly sweep around the face of the bedside clock. Minesweeper, he thought, absurdly.

  Certain “reasonable” questions bobbled in his mind—what’s his pulse? his respirations? can you get his blood pressure?—and then disappeared.

  Oh Rose-Marie, I love you.

  I’m always dreaming of you.

  On the other end the nurse was crying.

  “Shhh, shhh,” he said foolishly. “You mustn’t cry. You’ll wake my wife.” He could see her stirring, starting to turn toward him, and he mumbled “Sorry, sorry,” and walked cautiously out of the bedroom, past the children’s rooms to the kitchen, where he took directions, the white telephone a strange thing in his strange hand. He half heard, half remembered that his father’s nurse had a mild speech defect, a sibilant s. Now she sounded like a steam radiator whistling at him about the West Side Highway, the New Jersey Turnpike, this street, that street, some of which he knew, having grown up nearby, but he wrote it all down. Beige clapboard house, Walt Disney statues—statues?—in the backyard.

  He phoned the garage for his car, then returned to the dark bedroom, where he dressed as if for work—suit, shirt, tie. His wife murmured a sleepy “Bye, dear,” and resumed her gentle, even breathing.

  Why hadn’t he asked the nurse what his father was doing at her place at this time of night? Why hadn’t Dan asked the nurse anything, he who asked patients if they used drugs and how many sexual partners they had, and whether their husbands had relations with men?

  The roads were empty. He sped through the hot night but he had the feeling that he was plodding, that the air had thickened into sludge.

  Who was this hissing woman whom he’d seen over the years at his father’s office without especially notici
ng her? She had seemed a bit older than Dan, perhaps in her mid-fifties, or maybe she seemed older because her hair had gray in it, and she was mildly overweight, albeit shapely. His mother had complained she said “eck setera” and “for him and I.” Sum total of his memories, except Rosemarie had once made him a sandwich and a good cup of coffee at the office and unobtrusively exchanged Dan’s father’s full ashtray for a clean one.

  As he drove, the red numbers of his expensive digital watch—a present from his father—flashed 2:14:40:9, the tenths of seconds rolling over each other, the seconds running, the minutes. He was warm and clammy despite the blasting air conditioner.

  As instructed, he pulled into the third driveway on the north side of the block and turned off his lights. Automatically, he pulled out the emergency kit he kept under his seat, trying to remember what he had in there … CPR face shield, suture stuff, forceps …

  It was a bright night, the sky white with stars. White-hot. He walked quickly past the statues of a faun and Snow White and a number of dwarfs—Jesus! Were all seven of them really there, Happy and Dopey and whoever? White dwarfs … disintegrating stars. How peculiar that the universe contained billions of stars in billions of constellations, in billions of galaxies. Every star had to die. Although it was a short walk, his shirt felt damp against his chest by the time he entered the house.

  She had left the side door open for him and a small light on in the muggy kitchen. There was a portable TV on the kitchen table, and the walls, of pasteboard paneling meant to look like knotty pine, were dotted with picture postcards and articles ripped out of newspapers. The close air smelled of beer and cigars.

  He turned left and moved quickly to the living room, where her son—she’d told Dan—was sleeping on the couch. What was his name? Alan? Albert? Dan had seen him once years ago at the office reading a comic book. And to Dan’s relief, a long thin boy who looked to be fourteen was, in fact, stretched out there asleep, mouth breathing, a bare foot on the coffee table where a plastic fan clattered. Beside it a sandwich lay half eaten on a paper plate along with a full glass of milk.

  Dan carried his kit (the metal box was slippery now—he stopped a second to wipe his hands on his pants) up the narrow noisy staircase to the second floor. In the dark hallway there was a thin strip of light from ceiling to floor where a door was open a crack.

  He pushed it open wider and entered the small bedroom. At once he became aware of an unpleasant, sweetish-sharp smell in the air. He looked around quickly, wrinkling up his nose in the heat. At the far end of the small room on a dark dresser sat a plastic tray of perfume bottles and scattered hairpins, and a bra, the cups of which stood up. A man’s trousers and knit shirt lay rumpled over the back of the one chair and on the floor nearby were a pair of shimmery green-gold silk boxers. A large fan whirred in the window, blowing the white curtains into the room. Two small lamps, the only sources of light, stood on the night tables on either side of the double bed, which looked freshly made with white sheets and a white eyelet cover pulled tight.

  For an instant Dan had the thought that he was alone in this peculiar house except for the boy downstairs, that it was a prank some spiteful patient had pulled and here he was carrying his emergency kit into a strange bedroom in the middle of the night looking for all he knew like a burglar, or a murderer who couldn’t make up his mind about his weapon.

  Then he saw her sitting on the floor on the other side of the bed almost in the corner, her back up against the wall, her head bowed. Her hair was harsh blue black now, stuck to her round face, her dark eyes were downcast, and under her bright orangey lipstick—it seemed freshly applied, the brightest thing in the place except for the green-gold boxer shorts—her lips looked swollen, her nose was gashed. Over a pajama top, she wore her open nurse-receptionist’s white coat, ROSEMARIE embroidered on the pocket in script.

  As she made no sign of being aware of Dan’s presence, he walked quickly around the foot of the bed. There on the floor, covered to his neck with a bedspread, lay his father, his head cradled in her lap, his forehead leaning up against her belly protruding in tight jeans; she was caressing his cheeks and his chin. For an instant Dan looked away, attended to the pale-blue shiny acetate fabric of the bedspread, as if it were the center of the scene.

  Then he knelt and felt for his father’s pulse at his cool throat and at his wrist, which seemed warm. Had she been holding it? His father’s pupils were large and black, looking at nothing. From his jacket pocket Dan pulled out his penlight and shone it in his father’s eyes. Two stones. Although it made no sense, he yanked off the bedspread and, looking away from his father’s lax glistening penis curved on the dark scrotum, hauled him away from Rosemarie by the ankles. She grunted in surprise. Had she not kept her hands under his father’s head, Dan would have banged it on the floor. He pulled his father’s undershirt up—the thing was on inside out with the label under his father’s chin—and, with his hands joined in a fist, smashed down as hard as he could at the midpoint of his father’s chest. He banged down twice more and thought he heard or felt a rib crack. He pressed his ear very tightly against the cool chest wall. He could hear his own blood racing in his ear as if he were listening to a seashell. He banged again and again and again and stopped only when Rosemarie threw her arms around his father’s chest. Dan pushed her away roughly and listened. The empty shell.

  He drew the bedspread back up. Dan shut his father’s eyes and closed his own and sat outside the arc of light thrown by the small bedside lamp and after a while heard himself say the first line of the Shema, all he knew: “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One. He was surprised to hear himself say it because he didn’t believe in God.

  After a moment Dan opened his eyes and looked at the slack skin of his father’s neck, at his prominent cheekbones. Tatar cheekbones. One of his father’s eyes was narrower than the other, as if he had been punched, and the tissues had begun to swell. Dan looked at Rosemarie’s “peasant face,” his mother had once called it, to his father’s annoyance. “Pleasant face,” his father had corrected her. It was a pleasant face still, despite the sag at the chin: all the features were full, soft, rounded, even the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth curved upwards. Dan saw now that her lower lip was indeed swollen, bruised, the skin of her nose torn.

  He looked back at his father’s narrowed eye. There was a cluster of broken blood vessels under it, on his father’s right cheek.

  Dan sat down on the bed, his eyes intent on her face. “What happened? What happened here?”

  She inched down a little to where his father lay and took his head in her lap again.

  “I need to know.” He knew. He didn’t know. “Don’t be a prude. Were you into S&M? I’m a gynecologist—believe me, I’ve seen everything.”

  She glared at Dan. “He had a fit! A huge seizure! I’m lucky I didn’t get my skull fractured!”

  “How could he have a seizure? He wasn’t an epileptic.”

  “You tell me. You’re the doctor.”

  “Just give me the sequence of events.” He tried to gentle his voice. “Anything. This is terrible”—then he forced himself to add—“for both of us.”

  She looked at his father’s head in her lap and began to cry.

  He waited for what seemed a long time, although his watch indicated only two minutes had passed. “Anything. Tell me anything at all.” His voice surprised him—there was a tone of real sympathy in it.

  Finally, when she began to speak, she did not look at him, seemed to be talking to his father, whose head rested in her lap. “We were, we were—” She touched her fingertips together and bounced them against each other several times and then clasped her hands shut. “He came by around twelve. We drank some beer. Ali’s asleep downstairs, so we never sit there long—usually just till your father unwinds. We watched maybe fifteen minutes of TV. An old movie.” She paused for a moment and twirled an index and third finger back and forth arou
nd each other as if they were dancing. “Gigi,” she finally got out, “with Leslie Caron.”

  Usually. Never. The words sounded strange to him, foreign. Although she spoke softly, they boomed ominously, battering rams.

  “We—came—up here. He was edgy because he missed a diagnosis of AIDS in an infant. Someone else caught it, but Sam felt humiliated. I tell you, he looked fine! Not sick at all! I talked about the trouble my boy’s been having at school. He said he’d get Ali some tutoring—” She began to cry again, her shoulders hunched in the white coat. She rocked back and forth. After a while, still leaning over his dead father, she dried her eyes with the bedspread.

  “We—we—we got out of—” She waved an arm at the dresser and chair where their clothes lay. “He was waiting—waiting for me … ” She smiled at the dead man tenderly.

  As what she was saying began to sink in, Dan’s hot face heated up further.

  “He started telling me this joke about the Germans starting a sex school during the Second World War. For making babies. And they had a graduating class and they were asking the girls who they wanted to father their kids … Suddenly your father opened his mouth wide—and made high yipping noises and choking sounds, and his eyes were tearing”—she shut her eyes tight—“and I thought, like an idiot, he’s really into this joke. ‘Shhhush, shhhush,’ I say. ‘Ali’s sleeping.’” She looked apprehensively at the door now as if she expected to see her son there any minute. Then she looked at Dan. “He had a big seizure. He started thrashing around on top of me. I thought he’d break my nose.” Then she began to cry again and buried her face in his father’s chest. Dan felt an urge to lift her up—whether to comfort her or to get her off his father he wasn’t sure.