The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  I resisted the impulse to ask her what she had been on the rebound from, for she was, I’m sorry to say, the most physically repulsive young woman I’d ever met, the kind any sensible man would flee from before he’d made any sad-eyed, hopeful kids to be drawn along in her awful wake.

  “You ever see the weasel, do me a favor and give him a message for me,” she began, but I held up my hand and said that I wasn’t so great about remembering messages and that I doubted I’d be running into Claude.

  Inside, my father had already ordered by the time I slid onto the stool next to him. “Who’s she?” he wanted to know. When I told him, he nodded. “How’d you like to wake up next to that for the rest of your life?”

  For some reason, despite my aversion to her, I felt an odd impulse to defend Lisa Schwartz, though I didn’t know why or even how. And when Harry came over and asked me what I wanted, I didn’t know the answer to that either.

  During the long months of my father’s chemotherapy, I made no mention to him of Leigh’s pregnancy. If he thought it strange that she never came with me to Mohawk, he never said so. After all, he had just the small one-bedroom, and the couch I slept on in the living room was not a convertible sofa, like all the old Sam Hall couches had been. He may even have concluded that my visits were selfishly motivated. Most of the men he knew—indeed, most of the men he’d known all his life—had learned to prefer the company of men after they were married, and many of them had elevated to an art form the process of not going home until they were good and ready. Whenever the phone rang behind the bar in Mohawk gin mills, a motley chorus—“I’m not here,” “I left ten minutes ago,” “You ain’t seen me in weeks”—went up along the bar. It’s entirely possible that my father interpreted my always arriving alone as evidence that I was training Leigh right, the way he wished he’d trained my mother.

  And, in fact, there was an element of selfishness to my frequent weekends in Mohawk. Leigh and I did fairly well during the week. She was still working and she headed uptown early in the morning, leaving the apartment quietly, so as not to wake me. I habitually read late into the night, rose late in the morning, arriving uptown in time for luncheon meetings with writers and marketing people and other editors. Then I typically worked at the office until nine or ten at night, when Leigh and I would share a late supper, the day’s anecdotes and outrages, and, even now, frequently, our bed. The crowded day was what Leigh seemed to need, and I missed her far too much during that day to spend what little time we had in the evenings quarreling.

  Weekends were different, though. I looked forward to them, but they almost never turned out well. With forty-eight uninterrupted hours before us, it always seemed to me that Leigh might be persuaded to change her mind by Monday morning. She must have feared the same thing, because come Friday evening she’d grow more distant, superficially affectionate, it seemed to me, without opening herself to the possibility of real passion. During the week, when she knew I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could alter her resolve in an hour or two, she’d kiss me open-mouthed, drawing me eagerly toward our bed where she would receive and return my affections almost desperately, but Saturday night always found her more playful than loving, and her lips were then dry and cool. When I suggested we go someplace for the weekend, she always said, “Not a chance, pal. You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”

  In fact, it was often Leigh who encouraged me to visit my father in Mohawk as an alternative to the certain unpleasantness of a weekend in the city, where every suggestion I made—a movie, dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, even some jazz on the stereo—was likely to be interpreted as my crossing over some invisible boundary she had staked out without telling me. “I don’t see why you have to act this way,” I told her. “You’re behaving like a seventeen-year-old playing virgin the morning after. You’ve already given me all there is to give. This holding back, this pretending you don’t love me when it suits your purpose is plain silly.”

  I shared exactly none of this with my father, of course. There were plenty of things in the world that he was pretty shrewd about, but he was even more helpless and confused around women than I. Neither my mother nor Eileen had been exactly complicated, but he’d shaken his head over the two of them as if comprehending what they wanted from him required a minute understanding of astrophysics. Perhaps Leigh was not so much more complex, but she seemed so to me, and I wasn’t about to betray my confusion to a man who could only deepen it, not when he seemed to believe I had things pretty well in hand.

  And so, every other weekend, or every third one, depending on his condition after the most recent treatments and how well he’d recovered from their debilitating effects, I went to Mohawk to see my father. Miraculously, throughout the strong chemotherapy, he kept most of his wiry hair, though he claimed his shower drain was full every day. The third or fourth day after his treatment he’d start eating again, even if it was only an apple at first, his appetite improving daily until it was time to go back to the hospital. Sometimes, in the middle of a meal, however, he would break out in a cold sweat and begin to shake. The cure for that was a cold beer. He couldn’t stand the taste of the first one, but after that he’d be all right. He was under strict orders not to drink, of course, but he said that half the time he neither drank nor wanted to. Besides, beer wasn’t really drinking anyway. According to his doctors, the tumor on his lung was shrinking, and that was the main thing. “You can’t give up every damn thing and still call it living, right?” he said, nudging me. Then, when I didn’t respond, “Right?”

  “Whatever,” I told him.

  Then he’d put his thin arm on the bar, hand open. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” he said. “This arm is about the only thing I got that still works, and it’d be just like you to break it.”

  “Your mouth still works,” I said.

  He decided to ignore me. “Besides,” he went on, “if I ever beat you, it’d be pretty embarrassing, getting your ass kicked by a man with about two weeks to live.”

  The Christmas holidays found me in New York by myself. Leigh flew to Colorado to be with her mother, who was living alone in the large family house, Leigh’s father having divorced her and remarried two years before, relocating in Seattle. I had known for some time that her father was part of what was not right between us. She’d been even more devastated than her mother to learn that for many years he had carried on a secret affair with a woman known to both her mother and herself, and who had often been a guest in their home. Leigh’s own husband had been a good deal less discreet in his philandering, and I think she gave far less thought to him and what he’d done to her directly than to her father and his indirect breach of faith. The old man had not only fooled her but shaken her faith in her own judgment at a time when she could have used a little reinforcement. (The revelations of her husband’s and her father’s betrayals had virtually coincided.) New York was not the best place in which to search for lost faith.

  I hated to see her go to Colorado for the holidays because I was very afraid she would not come back. She and her mother, who had never been close, were lately drawn together by the similarity of their misfortune—their status as victims—and I feared that the older woman’s resignation and withdrawal, however understandable, would attract Leigh as a posture for coping. She had begun to talk of quitting her job instead of taking the maternity leave she was entitled to, and going someplace where you could breath the air. The morning I accompanied her to La Guardia I began to prepare myself for the phone call that seemed inevitable. Her voice would be more distant than Colorado when she assured me that I wouldn’t have to do anything, that she’d already called the mover, that a date had been fixed for the van if I would just gather her things in some out-of-the-way place so they could be got at. I wouldn’t even have to miss work.

  This was the call I was expecting when the phone rang and my father’s voice, much closer than Colorado, crackled on the line. �
��Merry Christmas,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be home. How come you aren’t visiting your mother?”

  “Because she lives in California,” I said. “That and about a hundred other reasons.”

  “I know a few of them,” he said. “You want to run up for a day or two?”

  I didn’t, really. The cumulative effect of my recent weekends in Mohawk, as well as of leaving my mind there when I returned to the city, was that I was behind in my work. With the city shut down for the holidays, I had thought to get caught up. At least a little.

  “I could,” I told my father. “Maybe the week between Christmas and New Year’s, if that’s all right.” I was already thinking of possible excuses to use later to put the visit off until after the first of the year.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I’m all done.”

  My chest knotted up like a fist. “What do you mean?”

  “No more,” he said, as if he imagined that this equally ambiguous phrase cleared matters up. When I didn’t say anything, he finally added, “I’m cured. You don’t have to act so surprised. I never promised to die. I just figured I would, that’s all.”

  I still couldn’t find words. The last time I’d spoken to him he had been discouraged. The size of the tumor had been reduced, but he had lost another five pounds, his blood count was off, his skin even more jaundiced. His doctor had balled him out too, told him to get serious, that he could only safely administer two more treatments without ensuring the destruction of all his healthy organs. He had to start eating whether he felt like it or not. Eat and exercise and nothing else, or it was all for nothing.

  “The tumor’s shrunk?” I finally managed.

  “Not shrunk” he said. “Gone.”

  “That’s astonishing.”

  “That’s what I said. I said are you sure you got the right chart, Doc. I’m a sick man. He said not anymore. Showed me the X ray and everything. Last couple treatments did the trick, apparently. I’m clean as a whistle. He says go home and don’t smoke and you might live to be a hundred.”

  Right then, I think I believed he would. Almost incredibly, it seemed he had beaten the odds again. If Sam Hall had a specialty, that was it. I remembered the rack of pool he’d shot against the skinny kid in the thin t-shirt, coaxing his far superior opponent into a scratch off the eight. Then there was the afternoon he had arm-wrestled Drew Littler on the kitchen table, putting all two hundred and fifty pounds of raw youth flat on his back. Not to mention Normandy, the survival of which was surely the greatest trick of all. What other name was there for it? Not luck. Not skill. Not even craft, exactly, because craft was something you could call upon routinely, whereas my father was able to summon whatever it was that he sometimes summoned only when the situation was seemingly hopeless. Only then could he be counted on to find the combination. I remembered his old promise to Eileen, that he’d outlive everybody and bury her under Nathan Littler’s obelisk.

  “You don’t have to worry, though,” he said. “I won’t live to be a hundred.”

  “It’s fine with me if you do,” I told him. “Be two hundred.”

  “Your dolly there?”

  “Yes,” I said before I could think, responding to a reflex that did not want to admit to him that she was gone, maybe for good.

  “Put her on a minute.”

  “She’s out … Christmas shopping actually.”

  “Then why’d you say she was there?”

  “I meant here in the city.”

  “Where the hell else would she be?”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m really glad about the news, Dad. I can’t believe it.”

  “Me either,” he said. “The only problem is the last treatment did something to my eyes. I suddenly can’t see worth a shit.”

  “What’s your doctor say?”

  “New glasses. Thick ones. I’d get them except things are a little tight right now …”

  “Listen,” I said. “Would a couple hundred help?”

  “You could if you wanted,” he said. I could see him shrugging on the other end of the line. “I don’t need them, really. There’s nothing in this town worth looking at, and not a goddamn thing I haven’t already seen a hundred times more than I wanted to.”

  So we left it that I’d send a check in the morning, not because he needed it, or because he wanted me to, but because I insisted. When we hung up, I discovered that instead of feeling elation, I was mildly, maybe even more than mildly, irritated with him. At first I thought it was because of the way he’d started out, saying he was “all done,” a phrase even my father must have realized invited the wrong interpretation. Then I thought maybe it was the business about the glasses, his stubborn unwillingness to accept help, his insistence that everybody understand that any consideration or concern or affection shown him was done purely for the edification of the giver. But the annoyance went even deeper, and I knew it as I stared out the apartment window and up into the darkening New York sky. My reflection in the glass allowed me a brief, horrible glance at what lay at the heart of things. Strangely enough, I’d been thinking about it for days, ever since I’d gone with Leigh to the airport and put her on the plane. What I’d been denying, even as I worried it like a scab, was the possibility that my father was the reason I was losing Leigh. I had made a terrible mistake, it occurred to me, in telling her all about him, of painting his portrait so vividly, of allowing her extended conversations with him on the phone. And I realized how grateful I was that circumstances had prevented their actual meeting. Had they done so, had Leigh been able to see my father and me standing shoulder to shoulder, she would at that moment have understood me, who I was, where I came from, all the things that—it now came home to me—I had been carefully concealing from her.

  In his own way my father had both understood and expressed what I’d been feeling in that long moment of silence that had followed the news of his cure. I was afraid that he would live to be a hundred.

  44

  I didn’t go to Mohawk the week between Christmas and New Year’s, nor the week after that. To my surprise, Leigh called and said she was returning to the city the day before New Year’s. On the phone she sounded depressed, but refused to talk about her stay in Colorado. At the time I concluded that her mother must have been lurking nearby. I didn’t care, really. I was too happy to discover that Leigh was returning a week early—that she was returning at all—to press for details.

  At La Guardia, she seemed happy to see me and she did not object when I told her I’d made reservations for a late dinner that night. I had in mind that we would see the new year in quietly, privately. She looked tired though, and I insisted she take a nap when we got back to the apartment. She slept the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening. I didn’t go in until it was time to dress or miss our reservation, and I found her there in the semidark, awake and thoughtful, and again, it seemed, glad to see me. We walked to the restaurant through wet, slow-motion snow that fell straight down and melted on impact everywhere except along the cast iron fences and window gratings. On the way Leigh told me she’d been to see a gynecologist in Denver and that it was his opinion that we’d miscalculated—she was nearly a month farther along than we’d thought, which explained a lot. February now, not March. In fact, she was noticeably larger, and she was carrying our child right out in front now, though still high. Perhaps because I could tell that it mattered to Leigh, I said I didn’t see what difference it made that we’d miscalculated, except that she was that much closer to the end of her discomfort. I knew her thinking though, and did not, for once, make matters worse by proposing again. That she had come back filled me with hope, and I didn’t want to ruin New Year’s Eve.

  The quiet restaurant I’d chosen turned out to be anything but quiet, and the dark corner table I’d envisioned turned out to be in the center of the dining room. The place was still hopping at ten o’clock. People we didn’t know stopped to congratulate us on Leigh’s condition. We were sent a bottle o
f champagne by an elderly couple in the corner booth I’d hoped for, along with instructions that I was to drink most of it.

  I was worried about Leigh, but I shouldn’t have been, because she did fine, as if she’d discovered that the attentions she’d been trying to avoid were not to be feared after all. We had a good meal and everyone seemed to understand when we decided to leave ten minutes before the new year’s arrival. We were escorted to the door by a dozen or so revelers and well-wishers, including the elderly couple who’d sent over the champagne. They offered to share a taxi with us, which we politely declined, explaining that we lived only a few blocks away. It had stopped snowing by then and as we walked slowly along the dusted sidewalks we listened to the mixed sounds of several parties cascading down from the apartments above.

  And so the new year was ushered in without much help from Leigh and me. The clock above the refrigerator said five after midnight when we came in, and we undressed and climbed into bed without reference to the future and without making a single resolution, together or individually regarding it. When the lights were out, Leigh began to cry, and I let her until she felt better or, failing that, felt like stopping. “She’s a horrible woman,” Leigh said finally. “Small and mean-spirited and self-centered. I don’t blame Daddy a bit.”

  “Well …” I began.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be comforted. I just want you to know that I’m just like her. If you marry me, I’ll probably end up driving you to somebody else, and then I’ll blame you for it and so will everybody. You’ll even blame yourself.”

  “What do you want?” I said. “Do you want me to promise not to blame myself?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t want to be my mother. I want to be who I want to be.”

  “Fine,” I said, stroking her hair. “Your wish is granted.”

  I heard the first ring as I stepped into the shower, but Leigh was there to answer it, so I climbed in anyway. She had started her maternity leave the last week in January to wait out the final few weeks in our warm apartment. It was now the first week of February and we were in the middle of the longest stretch of subzero weather since they’d started keeping records. It was the kind of demoralizing cold that I imagined had caused my grandfather to capitalize “Winter.”