A History of the Present Illness

by Louise Aronson

  “What happen?” asked the aide.

  He explained.

  Ruth snorted and turned to face the wall. “If you see it differently,” he said, “then sit back up and say so.”

  Silence.

  The aide pointed at the door. “You go now please.” He left gladly. After all, he had things to do.

  In the hallway, he nodded at the janitor and smiled at Deborah Wasserman, who was leaning forward on her walker to study the bulletin board that listed the day’s events.

  “Beautiful sweater,” he said as he passed her. “Great with your eyes.”

  Deborah looked down at her sweater and smiled.

  Everywhere he went at the New Israel, women outnumbered men three, sometimes four, to one. As a result, the home was socially the opposite of real life—his real life, at least. From the moment he arrived, he’d been sought out by women who, fifty, thirty, even ten years before, wouldn’t have given him the time of day. To his astonishment, in his ninth decade he’d become the cream of the crop. And all because he could still walk and think, because he still had hair and a talent for social graces.

  At the end of the hall, he glanced behind him. Deborah turned quickly back toward the bulletin board. Gotcha, he thought, and whistling “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” he turned the corner toward the nurses’ station.

  Zeni stood behind the broad blue counter wearing a uniform top imprinted with alternating Band-Aids and teddy bears. Blue was Tel Aviv 5’s official color. The walls were blue, the fifth-floor residents’ medical charts bore big blue stickers, and on the elevator, there was a blue square next to the number 5 button, a visual reminder for those who had trouble remembering which floor they called home.

  “You tell her?” Zeni asked. Unlike the rest of the mostly Filipino staff, who were so polite that he could never tell where he stood with them, Zeni had no trouble speaking her mind.

  “I said I would.”

  “No shouting from Ruth?” she said, pulling a red SIGN HERE arrow off the edge of the counter.

  “You missed it.” He glanced down the hallway. People were starting to emerge from their rooms and make their slow way to breakfast. “Did you get her an appointment? For this morning?”

  Zeni nodded. She was efficient, that much he had to admit.

  “And where you will live?”

  So far he’d told no one but Gisela the answer to that question in case she, as the newly elected head of the Residents’ Council, might be in a position to help him. And sure enough, Gisela had come up with a plan that she’d unveiled on the way to the Academy of Sciences, the two of them sitting in the back row of the transport van and whispering to each other as if they were still in high school.

  He jiggled the change in his pocket. “Only one place to live—Jaffa.”

  Zeni covered her mouth with one hand, shaking her head and laughing as though he couldn’t possibly be serious.

  The breakfast bell rang like some faraway chime. Not that she cared to eat. Drained of color, the food at the New Israel looked awful and tasted worse. She’d lost so much weight already that her skin hung on her body as if she were wearing one of Harold’s man-size sweaters. And anyway, it wasn’t even eight in the morning, much too early for anything but coffee.

  Lovey had said she’d be back, but of course she hadn’t returned. This was the staff’s busiest time of day, when they had to get everyone up and ready, breakfasted and medicated. So there was nothing to do but stare at the walls of her soon-to-be-single room, a rectangle with two beds, two sinks, and two dressers.

  As they did about everything else, she and Harold had disagreed about how to decorate. In the end, they’d divided the room like children, an imaginary line down the center. His side had furniture brought from home, a huge CD player, and, on the walls, his bluegrass posters and instruments, with the Martin guitar and his five-string banjo in the places of honor visible from the doorway. On either side of the instruments, Bill Monroe, Hazel Dickens, Earl Scruggs, and J. D. Crowe plucked and crooned on framed oversize posters he had kept in a document tube until two months after moving to the New Israel.

  She hadn’t decorated her side. Nice things only reminded her of all she’d lost in moving here—her home in Presidio Heights, the garden she’d planted and tended for fifty years. Her right to sleep and wake and eat when she wanted.

  And now she was losing Harold too. She had no idea how or why she’d go on.

  She pressed the button that moved her bed to an upright position. Maybe she should have gone to more social programs or worn the damn wig as he’d asked. “Have a little self-respect, will you?” he’d said too loudly and too often in the days and weeks after they’d first moved in. But at the New Israel she gave her clothes each Tuesday to a girl for the wash. If they came back damaged or ruined—as they did, more often than not—what could she do about it? So she’d taught herself not to care. As for the wig, why couldn’t Harold, with his better-than-new-after-cataract-surgery eyes, see what would happen if she wore it? From twenty feet away she might look well put together and not unattractive, but up close would be another story, the young hair a shock against her rumpled old face. In late middle age, she’d begun noticing such women in Laurel Village and, a few years later, among her friends from the Mount Zion Auxiliary or his from the Concordia Club. She didn’t care to join their ranks.

  Harold had changed since their move. Each morning, he visited people newly arrived at the home, just returned from the hospital, or otherwise in a state of transition. When not in the music room or at an activity, he fretted about the well-being of women and men he barely knew—everyone’s well-being, it seemed, but hers.

  Not that his concern about the opinions of others was new. For decades, when they’d gone to the symphony or the theater, Harold had never known what he thought of a performance until the following day. Only after reading the reviews in the morning paper and consulting with a few friends—those who might themselves have spoken to someone who’d rung up a society page regular, one of the Goldsteins or Lillienthals or Blums—only then did he have an opinion. Her own take on such matters rarely coincided with his, but in the early years of their marriage he’d appreciated her homegrown uniqueness. When they’d begun dating, she with nothing more than a high school diploma, she’d believed that he, with his fancy East Coast education, would guide her to all that was remarkable in the world. Once married, she’d quickly learned that his years at Princeton and Harvard meant little to him beyond their utility as accessories, like the handkerchief placed just so in the breast pocket of his dress suit. She’d had to find culture for herself and had done so through books and women’s groups, her cooking and her garden, a wonderland of herbs and edible plants for which she’d been presented a key to the city.

  She looked across the room at the photograph proudly displayed on his dresser: Harold’s arm around her waist as Mayor Moscone handed her the oversize key. Two weeks later, Moscone was dead, killed by a jealous supervisor, and Harold had removed the photograph from above the sofa in their den and taken it downtown to his office, where he had used it to impress the beautiful people with whom he had had a lifelong unrequited courtship.

  Unrequited, at least, until now. When they forced her to eat in the dining room, she heard the gossip—there was nothing wrong with her ears. Ironically, at the New Israel, where Harold at last had decided to be his unedited self, right down to his previously secret love of bluegrass, he’d attained the social status he always wanted. For this reason if no other, she was glad they’d moved in.

  As soon as Jerusalem opened, he crossed the courtyard toward the imposing Greek revival, three stories of granite, with narrow rectangular windows and a portico framed by thick fluted columns. The administration building’s classic elegance reminded him of the stock exchange, where he’d spent most of his working life—it was the sort of place a man could go with a complaint or a suggestion and expect to be heard.

  He straightened his hair and stepped into the
reception suite.

  “Running late,” warned the secretary, tossing her head in the direction of the CEO’s closed office door.

  “I’ll wait,” he said. He would miss his tai chi class, but so be it.

  Forty-five minutes later, Andrew Ross greeted him with a warm handshake and a cursory apology.

  Furious, he followed the CEO through his office door, then stopped short.

  A mural covered the room’s back wall, a giant cityscape of Jerusalem painted floor to ceiling, creating the illusion that the CEO’s oversize desk sat atop the hill beside the Knesset, sharing its fabulous views. He’d never seen anything like it. Everywhere were perfect likenesses of actual structures: the Shrine of the Book, the Israel Museum, and the Judean Mountains. Years earlier, he and Ruth had visited them all.

  Andrew Ross grinned, then motioned at the visitor’s seat, a wooden armchair emblazoned with the home’s logo and situated near the part of the mural portraying slightly run-down and very ordinary houses. “Have a seat. I haven’t got much time.”

  Without mentioning Ruth, he explained his situation. He used the word urgent in a way that might have been construed as misleading and said, truthfully, that most of his friends lived in Jaffa. Since he spent his days exercising, going to activities, playing music, and attending the Residents’ Council meetings with those friends, it only made sense for him also to live in the same building and eat in the same dining room as they did. He admitted that he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

  Andrew Ross positioned a pair of glasses halfway down his nose and typed into his computer. “There’s a wait list.”

  He’d been prepared for that. “Three fourteen is open. Has been for months. Maintenance says there’s a problem with one wall.” Fred in maintenance had also told Gisela that the home, following the capital campaign for the new end-stage-dementia building, lacked the funds to repair it.

  Andrew Ross removed his glasses. “Go on.”

  “I’ll pay to fix it up, but then it’s mine. You get free repairs and another room rent. I skip the wait list.”

  The CEO took a cloth from his pants pocket and cleaned his glasses, first the front and then the back. “It was my idea, you know,” he said without looking up. “One of the first things I did when I took this job was to make Jaffa home for the healthiest and most independent residents. A few years back, it used to be psych, and of course, no one wanted to be there. Or to have dad there, or grandma. But now Jaffa’s got prestige. Now everyone wants in.”

  “Pure marketing genius,” Harold agreed, hoping the conversation wasn’t going where he suspected it was.

  “It’s not just that room that’s beat-up, you know,” said Andrew Ross, leaning back and using his high-end ergonomic chair to full advantage. “From the outside, Jaffa might look handsome, but inside it’s a mess. Faded paint, chips in the plaster, exposed pipes. The ‘New’ in New Israel doesn’t apply to Jaffa.”

  There could be no question that Tel Aviv was superficially newer and nicer than Jaffa. But he had spent enough time in both buildings to know that people mattered far more than pipes.

  Of course, that was his perspective as someone who already lived at the New Israel; it would be different if he, like Andrew Ross, was trying to convince people to move in or make a donation.

  “How much?”

  Andrew Ross smiled. Then he wrote a number on a Post-it note and passed it across the desk.

  That the numbers all fit on the one small rectangle was reassuring. The sum was significant, but it might have been worse.

  He slipped the Post-it into his pocket. “One condition. My wife gets our double in Tel Aviv to herself—”

  “Your wife? Three fourteen is a single.”

  “You looked up my finances, but not my marital status?” He stood. “Here’s the deal: My wife stays in Tel Aviv and gets whatever help she needs for as long as she needs it. I move to Jaffa, which, courtesy of me, starts looking a heck of a lot better.”

  He held out his hand. Andrew Ross walked out from behind his desk but didn’t extend his hand until he’d opened his office door.

  They didn’t bother with good-byes. At Ross’s age, Harold too would have made certain assumptions about an old man leaving his wife. And like the CEO, he wouldn’t have understood that even the very old could grow apart, that the husband might innocently develop new hopes, dreams, interests, and abilities, until suddenly he looked back and saw a giant chasm between himself and his wife, and that even if there were a way back to her, he might not be able to convince himself to cross back, afraid he no longer wanted or knew how to live on the other side.

  She hadn’t asked to see the doctor, but Zeni had insisted that she had an appointment, so here she was. It was one of the young ones from the university again, doctors who appeared for a while on a certain day of the week and then disappeared forever, and of course he was running late.

  Through the open exam-room window came bursts of guttural conversation. The morning was uncharacteristically cold and windy for September, but bad weather never stopped the Russians at the New Israel. They went outdoors wrapped in thick coats and scarves no matter the season or temperature. Or so Harold claimed. Most of what she knew about them she’d gathered from his complaints: they kept nonkosher foods like sausage and buttermilk on their windowsills; they distrusted the Residents’ Council, even though that body was meant to represent them too and interpreters were provided at all meetings; they rarely smiled when passing others in the hallway, except people they already knew. For the exact same reasons, she admired them tremendously.

  The doctor entered the room tucking his long black hair behind his ears like a schoolgirl. Why otherwise perfectly fine looking young men chose women’s hairstyles these days, she had no idea. He sat down on a little wheeled stool and slid forward until their knees were just inches apart and she could see his remarkably white, shiny teeth.

  “Ralph Nguyen,” he said. “I’m one of the interns working with Dr. Blumenfeld. I heard about your husband. How’re you doing?”

  He’d heard? Already? She’d only just heard herself.

  “The nurse.” He waved a hand toward the closed door. “You must have told whoever brought you over . . .”

  But she hadn’t. Apparently, at the New Israel, even husband-wife arguments were part of the public record.

  The doctor leaned forward. “It would be totally understandable if, under the circumstances, you felt sad or upset.”

  She resisted the urge to say No shit, Sherlock. Sometimes it was better just to keep quiet.

  “Hey,” he said gently, ducking his head so they were eye to eye. “I want to help you. But I need you to help me too.”

  She wondered whether he’d grown up without a father, so feminine were his movements and gestures. But before she could ask, someone knocked at the exam-room door. The doctor swiveled and stood. He didn’t push off, simply rose and crossed the room in two quick strides. At the door, he said, “When I’m done here,” then he pivoted—really it was more of a pirouette—took one giant step, and lowered himself to a perfect landing on his stool.

  She winced. The poor man. He would never find a wife. Besides, what could be explained to someone so young and agile?

  “Sorry,” he said. “Where were we?”

  As she recalled, they had been at the part where he’d commented that her distress at the dissolution of her sixty-two-year marriage might be something other than pathologic.

  When she didn’t answer, he launched into the usual questions about the pain in her back and shoulders and hips and the shadows she saw whenever she looked at anything head-on. Then he asked her a series of questions, circling yeses or noes as she told him that yes, she’d dropped most of her activities and interests, and yes, her life was empty and boring, and yes, she often felt helpless, hopeless, and worthless, which explained why no, she was not basically satisfied with her life, and no, she did not feel happy most—or even some—of the time, and no, she certai
nly did not think it was wonderful to be alive now. Finally, he opened the chart that was the sum total of her life at the New Israel and began writing.

  Sitting up exhausted her. The pain in her joints and spine had begun to crescendo from its usual hum to a chorus of distinct but colluding voices. She looked at the clock. It was still morning. All the time and effort Zeni and the aides had spent getting her up and dressed and across two buildings for her appointment, and after all that, there remained nothing but worse pain and another long, empty day ahead.

  “There’s never enough time, is there?” the doctor asked without looking up.

  There was, she thought, but only once you had no use for it.

  He wheeled her out into the reception area. “You’ll take one pill at night before bed,” he said. “This medicine isn’t a cure for grief, but it might help make things bearable.”

  More wasted time and money, she thought as he disappeared back into the exam room. Unless this one was a magic pill that would help her recover her eyesight, independence, house, and husband.

  When the lunch bell rang, he hurried to meet his friends at what would soon be his regular table. He loved that the dining room in Jaffa was nothing like the one in Tel Aviv 5, with its wheelchairs and feeding tables. Here, residents walked themselves to and from meals and sat four to a table, the tables in two neat rows, each with a crisp white tablecloth and a bright yellow flower in a tiny vase at its center.

  Someone called his name, and he scanned the room until he spotted Gisela waving from a table at the back. She was sitting with Stanley Luft, who played fiddle and mandolin for We Three Hebes.

  “We thought you forgot us,” Stanley said when he was close enough to hear.

  “Not a chance.” He glanced at Gisela. “I had a business meeting this morning that ran late. Luckily, it went very well.”

  Gisela smiled slightly, but in accordance with their plan, she didn’t otherwise acknowledge his good news.