Then there were the visitors, who in their number and warmth astonished him. People he barely knew, had nodded to in the corridor, came by to inquire about his health. Invited in, they had coffee and expatiated. It was touching; Lettie, at least, was touched. ‘Charisma,’ she remarked. ‘You could have been a politician.’ But Max said it was mere morbid curiosity: everyone swarms around those who have brushed with death, welcomes the wounded hero home from battle. Human nature; he accepted with forbearance and turned on the charm.
George Rakofsky of the birthday party rode up in his wheelchair one evening. ‘It’s good to see you up and about again,’ he told Max. ‘You’re too young to die.’
‘From your angle, maybe. But I decided to stick around for your next birthday party.’
They talked about business. George had started out in sports equipment, but after the war, he said, with the waves of young families moving to the suburbs, he found he could do even better in toys. ‘It used to be simple stuff. Lincoln Logs. Erector sets. Dolls that could pee were a big item. But now they’ve got these little models of McDonald’s. Holiday Inns. You wouldn’t believe! We were happy if we got a bat and ball.’
‘A broomstick.’
‘And a crate on wheels. Remember those, Max? That still beats a skateboard, for my money. I really enjoyed that store, though. I could talk to people as much as I liked—that was for me. I’ve always been interested in people. The women used to come in, they were bored, pushing the strollers. In my place they got some lively conversation, I’ll tell you. It didn’t hurt business either. I liked them, and I liked the kids too. That’s what I miss here—having kids around. I have five grandchildren, but they’re busy with their own things; that’s how it goes. And three great-grandchildren. One a new baby I haven’t seen yet.’
George had a broad resonant voice, younger than his body. A voice vibrant and ringed with calm. Max could understand the young mothers hanging around the toy store.
‘Did you ever try living with your sons?’
‘You don’t have sons or you wouldn’t ask. With sons come daughters-in-law. Not that they’re not nice girls, both of them. I have no complaints. But what would I do in their houses? Their kids are grown up and gone, and they’re out working. All the women, these days. More power to them, if you ask me. But I’m better off where I am. I don’t want to be an old pain in the ass living in the spare room.’
‘When did you move in here?’
‘Twelve years ago. After my wife died.’
Max got up and walked to the window. How long for him, in this new, bland calm? George at least had a memory, while his own seemed to have evaporated.
‘I don’t mind it, really. I visit, I listen to music. There are things to do. The only thing I worry about is another stroke—if I lose my speech. When that happens I’ll be finished. My wife used to say I could never have any secrets from her. Were you married, Max?’
He turned back to face George. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s peculiar, isn’t it? You know how they say if you lose a leg you can still get a pain in it? Twelve years, and still once in a while I wake up at night and reach out a hand...Do you know what I mean?’
‘Let me fill these up again.’ Max took the empty glasses to the kitchen. In deference to George’s diabetes he was serving plain iced tea. He poured a snot of bourbon into his own and returned.
George rambled on. One grandson was an orthopedist, another an insurance agent. His youngest granddaughter wanted to be a stockbroker—what did Max think of that? Max gazed with affection at the face webbed with wrinkles and lit by azure eyes. A comforting face, after the females who had moved into his life as if it were an empty house. Men were easier friends—mere guests, not tenants, they asked little of you. Thinking of Lettie and all she gave in return, he felt disloyal. But it was the truth.
‘I’m very glad you came,’ he said at the door. ‘Come back anytime. It does me good.’
George trapped him in a long, shrewd stare from which he couldn’t avert his eyes. Thoroughly withered, but how that face lived! And understood. ‘Pull yourself together, Max,’ he said brusquely. ‘Don’t waste your time.’
The next afternoon was Alison’s turn: he had granted permission at last. Lettie was with her, an arm protectively circling the child’s shoulders.
‘Hi, Max.’ Pale, hanging back, she extended a hesitant hand. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, come over here,’ he said impatiently. He pulled her inside, held her close and kissed her cheek. So smooth and dewy, it surprised him. When she began sniffling on his chest he moved her away. ‘Sit down. Lettie, do we have a cookie or something to keep her alive? You’re even thinner than before. Don’t they feed you?’
‘Sure, meat and potatoes.’ She put down the knapsack and took her sweatshirt off. ‘You’re not still mad at me? I mean, you want to talk to me?’
‘Of course I want to talk to you. Where else can I find such stimulating conversation?’
‘Are you kidding me, Max?’
‘Certainly not. Tell me what’s happening in the gym.’
‘Well, Fats is trying to continue the gymnastics but he really doesn’t know how. It’s very tedious. He has us all walking around on our hands—absolute chaos. Elliot strained his neck from it two weeks ago, a mild whiplash, so his father came in to complain, right in the middle of class. You would have enjoyed that scene. His father is sort of a cross between Dracula and Captain Kangaroo.’
‘Elliot was always too stiff. I wouldn’t have stood him on his hands yet.’
Lettie brought in a tray with chocolate cupcakes and milk. ‘Here, Alison. Eat something. I’ll eat with you. How is your mother coming along?’
‘Gross. Extremely gross. Just a few more weeks till the blessed event. Max? When are you coming back to school? I mean, it’s such drudgery without you.’
‘Look here, Alison, you want to be treated like a grownup, don’t you? So grow up—use your head. My days are numbered. I can’t do that stuff any more.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said promptly. ‘If they sent you home you must be better. I bet you could do it if you really tried. You look just the same as always.’ She bit the icing off the top of a cupcake. ‘Anyway, Max, do you think you could show me those pictures again, of the people in the circus?’
He had a surge of weariness. So besides the magic powers, she had decided he was immortal. Well, she would find out soon enough. Become the image, he used to tell the kids. But he couldn’t play the image she worshipped—it was beyond human powers.
‘Pictures?’ asked Lettie. ‘How come I haven’t seen them?’
‘Oh, they’re nothing special at all. What do you care about old pictures?’ Always wanting. He went to stand apart at the window, childishly longing for George, who knew enough to see him as he was, a heap of fragments.
‘Better some other time, dear,’ he heard Lettie whisper. Alison made a small, muted sound of disappointment.
He turned round. ‘No, that’s all right, Lettie. This time is as good as any. Those two albums in the bedroom closet—Alison, you can stand up on a chair to get them. I’m going to sit here and read. I’m a little tired.’
He couldn’t help but listen, though. What an intriguing child, despite everything. She had total recall.
‘That one is Henry. He stood on the bottom of the pyramid because of his legs and shoulders...They’re having a New Year’s party. See the balloons and streamers?...Oh, and look, Lettie, that’s Max. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Hold it. Let me get a good look. Aha! Yes, that’s him all right.’
‘That one with the monkey is a clown...The monkey’s name is Joanna. Isn’t she cute? He let her eat breakfast with the people sometimes...That’s Max’s trailer.’
‘Ah,’ said Lettie.
‘And that’s Max’s wife.’
Lettie said nothing. With eyes closed, he heard the pages turn. He heard their breathing. The black turtleneck sweater, the knees pulled to her chin. Th
e teasing look.
‘Wait,’ said Alison. ‘I haven’t seen this bunch before. There’s one of them together, with the clown. This is fantastic—they must be holding her up from behind, but it looks like she’s floating on air. You know, she was the one who taught him all the tricks. She coached him.’
‘Mm-hm.’ Not another word from Lettie, till after many pages the book was shut, and she said, ‘I think he must have fallen asleep. Maybe that’s enough for today, Alison.’
He opened one eye a fraction to glimpse her gathering up the knapsack and the sweatshirt, and taking a cupcake for the road.
‘Don’t forget the circus, Lettie. It’s two weeks from Saturday,’ she whispered.
‘I won’t forget, sweetheart. Good-bye now.’
‘I’ll see you before then anyway. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is coming next week. Oh, shit, I forgot—I can’t cut any more.’
‘Never mind; we’ll go for the four o’clock show.’
The door closed.
‘You can open your eyes now, Max, it’s safe.’
He did. Lettie was at the window, facing him. He watched her, a firm silhouette against the falling late-afternoon light. She stood extremely still, not a muscle of her face moving, and she looked not at him but into him.
‘She was very pretty,’ Lettie said. ‘Very beautiful. I see now.’
He had thought he knew her, but what she might be feeling at this moment was a mystery. There was more within than he knew. That was the lure of women: more inside than you ever imagined, a dark trail weaving through. As he watched, a burden clotted in his chest. Was she going to trouble him now too?
He had only a brief time to wait. Her eyes relaxed; her face slipped into a sly grin. ‘You weren’t so bad yourself, either. I feel like a stiff drink. How about you, Max?’
The burden lifted and he smiled at her, an intimate smile that already could call forth memories. He reached out his hand. ‘Come here just a minute, will you?’ he asked. ‘Before you make your stiff drink.’
He began dropping in to see George while Lettie was out shopping or at movies with her friends. From outside the door, the first time, he could hear strains of music.
‘Come on in. I was hoping you’d be around,’ George greeted him.
It shouldn’t have surprised him, yet it did, to find George’s apartment identical to his own. Rooms laid out the same, furniture in the same places but a trifle more worn. Instead of browns and oranges George had greens and golds. He brought out thick green cigars and they settled into a greenish haze of smoke, to talk, that first afternoon, till dinnertime. The cups they drank coffee from were the same, as well as the chrome equipment in the bathroom, which, Max thought with a pang, George must use. There were not many books but there were records. A music-lover, he played harpsichord music for Max. He had once built his own harpsichord, he said, which a grandchild had now; it had taken two years and infinite labor, evenings and weekends, but he was a patient man. Max, abashed at his own ignorance, listened to Bach and Scarlatti, awed at the splendor of form, the balance and precision. This was music that climbed and descended without cease, winding obsessively through lattices like bees humming in a hive. Austere and comforting, it was music with neither fury nor self-pity, transcending the cheaper emotions. He had never known such sounds. And as he listened, going down to George’s day after day, he looked out the window and saw things in slightly different perspective from this floor just below his own. The elms’ leafy tops were at eye level—you could almost reach out and pluck a twig—and the grass was nearer.
Some afternoons he wheeled George around outside, and they sat in the garden in back. It was mid May; there were daffodils, columns of tulips, a rosebush. The air was sweet and George a safe haven. In his homely long view, life was a steady passage in which everything eventually came to rest in proportion and harmonious balance. Balance, thought Max, was all one could finally wish for.
George wanted to know about the circus. Not the glamor—he had a pragmatic turn of mind and asked for no pictures—but the equipment, the rigging, the nuts and bolts of how it worked. Max felt his memory stir beneath the layer of the present; he scrabbled in the ruins and found shards. He told him how they dug in poles and strung up guys for the tent they would have to dismantle a few days later. Recounting that strenuous pulling on the ropes, a dozen men or more, the tense vigil as the big top caved in and crumpled, he could feel the slack muscles in his arms contract. Sense memory. He told him about getting the wires so taut and securing the nets, about hooking in the bars of the trapeze and erecting the platforms—four men used to the work could do that in no time at all. But then the trailers breaking down, the dreary waiting for new parts in dry one-horse towns. And with a revived, exhilarated weariness in his bones, he recalled how far and how long they used to travel, a straggling procession inching across the map, Florida to Oregon, May through November, then winter quarters down South, for a bit of rest.
‘That’s just like nomads! No roots,’ said George. ‘How could you stand it?’
‘We took the roots with us. I liked it that way.’
Like any old man, he thought, he was starting to generalize, to idealize what was gone.
‘But with all that expensive equipment, plus the traveling, and so many mouths to feed—did it really pay?’ George asked. ‘I mean, in terms of net profits.’
‘Some seasons we just about broke even, or worse, but other times it wasn’t bad. It depended on so many unpredictable things, like weather or sickness, for example. People having accidents. Animals—a pain in the ass, if you ask me. After the war we did better, with the men back and money circulating a little more freely. But it’s not the sort of thing you do for money, really.’
They smoked for a while in silence. ‘I had some very good friends there, must be dead now.’ Max got up. ‘Well, I’ve given you an earful. You ready to go back inside?’
The cigar in his mouth, George waved as he wheeled out of the elevator, and Max, left alone, wondered at himself. What had they done to his heart in that hospital? He was getting soft and nostalgic. He was glad Lettie would be out playing bridge tonight; he wanted the solitude. In his armchair, he read till the light faded, and hours later woke there in the dark with a heavy, peaceful feeling. It was new, maybe a different route to death; maybe Susie had known this feeling too. No, he didn’t want to think about her; he wanted this peace. He turned on a small lamp and made himself a sandwich, which he ate slowly in the dim living room. He wasn’t weak or sick, yet seemed to be moving in a dreamy haze, bewildered, a stranger to himself. Was this what vague old people drifted in, when they didn’t answer right away but stared as if some image hung before them in the air, then brought up odd bits of the past out of the blue? He was seized by an urge to order his affairs, correct what was distorted and incomplete. He picked up the phone.
‘It’s me, sweetheart. Your Friday-night admirer.’
‘What? Who is this?’
‘Oh, Vicky, you’re slipping.’
‘Max! You really scared me.’
‘So I gather. I called to tell you something.’ But he fell silent, like a diffident child.
‘Well? What is it?’
‘This: When I have taken my ultimate leave of these pleasurable knolls, as well as of everywhere else, when I have—uh—crossed the bar, as the poet said—’
‘I don’t like hearing you talk like this.’
‘Come off it and listen. Let your hair down, what you have left of it. What did you do that for, anyway?’
‘I’m not hanging on to be insulted. What do you want, Max?’
‘I want you not to remember how nasty I was to you.’
‘You are incredible! I can see why little girls chase after you.’
‘Don’t patronize a senior citizen. Will you do as I say?’
‘I’ll try, but I can’t promise. With you it’s all part and parcel.’
The next afternoon Lettie stopped in.
�
�You’re all decked out,’ Max said. ‘Going somewhere?’
‘Yes, a bunch of us are going out to lunch, and then I’ve got a dozen errands. I must get some shoes. There’s a sale in Bamberger’s. Did I leave my earrings here?’
‘Take a look.’
She bustled into his bedroom and back. ‘I found them. Max, it’s supposed to rain, so please don’t walk for miles. And we’ve got the circus tomorrow too—save your strength.’
‘I wanted a woman and I got a mother.’ And dutifully, barely touching, he kissed her on the cheek.
‘An, don’t make me faint with passion, please. I haven’t got the time.’
As she walked out the door he missed her. He would have liked some company today, though he would never ask. He had seen all the movies in town and read everything in the apartment, and the view out the window was a bleak gray.
Now might be a good time: he had been fumbling with the idea for days. He poured a drink for courage. And then another. He couldn’t tell how long he sat there, trying to rouse will against pride. Surely he could say it to George, who was so old, so beyond strife, that he could listen with serene disinterest, and carry secrets intact to the grave. Susie troubled his peace. She had become a tight, painful knot beneath his ribs. He would wrench out that knot and attempt to unravel it on George’s coffee table: how he had had her and lost her, but kept her alive by stealth with his broodings, and then, against his will, lost her again—not like the first time with stark grief, but murkily, absently, through distractions. What could be done? he yearned to ask. What could be done about the unendurable fact that everything a man possessed, even his ghosts, could be taken from him? Words such as those were not impossible, though he had rarely in his life humbled himself to speak so plain. Was it foolish to think that George, his mind content, his body stilled, might rearrange the strands of his knot into some bearable pattern?
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