The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  Doris left home as soon as she could, quit high school, took a job. She lived alone in the city for a few years, going to work on the subway, fraternizing only peripherally with the people she met—always the quiet, doe-eyed girl in the corner. And then she met Joe, and for the first time in her life she felt she was part of something. Thinking about it now, that night, the memories are too painful. She is not a glass-half-full person. She can’t focus on the positive, how they had forty great years together. Her husband is dead and that makes even the brightest memory ashen and cold.

  Once he got sick, once his neediness surpassed hers, once he lost the ability to shelter her, cater to her, she threatened to walk. She’s not proud of it, but there you go. You would think that after being cared for for so many years she would have turned around and returned the favor, stepped up and said, now it’s my turn, but this was not the way she was wired. This was not the dynamic they had. Their relationship had worked so well for so long because each provided the element the other needed most. In her case, it was someone to take care of her. In his case, it was someone to love, someone to watch out for. She was the key and he was the lock. And he’d ruined everything by getting sick, because the lock doesn’t open the key, and the key can’t protect the lock. It’s just not in their nature.

  This is not to say she didn’t try. In the beginning, when it was just his heart and there was a chance he could make a full recovery, she did everything she could. After the triple bypass surgery he stopped eating. A minor stroke, it turned out, had disrupted the taste centers of his brain, and nothing tasted the way it should. Doris spent the next three months running all over town, trying to find him something he could stomach. She went uptown for soup, downtown for brisket. She was the crazy lady in the cab rushing a box of noodles to Mt. Sinai. She called Scott in the middle of the night that fall and asked him where she could get pot, because she’d heard that marijuana stimulated the appetite. He said, how the hell should I know? She sounded disappointed, hung up, and called someone else. Three days later she smuggled a tray of pot brownies into the hospital. She thought she’d found the answer, but really she’d overlooked the most obvious obstacle, which was that brownies were food and, like everything else, Joe refused to eat them.

  Slowly, his appetite returned. He left the hospital, came home to the apartment. For the next year he went through phases—the salami and fried egg sandwich phase, the liverwurst on white bread phase. For six months he ate only curry, and so every night the apartment stank of Punjabi spices. They stopped sleeping in the same bed. Joe would wander the apartment all night chewing ice. The electric thunder of the refrigerator’s ice-maker would jar Doris from sleep. Joe was prone to episodes of moaning and sudden, sharp shouts of pain. His feet swelled. His circulation worsened. He would fall asleep in mid-conversation. He had terrible, humiliating bouts of diarrhea. For Doris, it was too much. Two years of constant crisis. This was not what she signed on for. How do you watch the person you love devolve into a set of symptoms? She had her own health to worry about, her sanity. So the next time he went into the hospital she insisted afterward that he go to a nursing home and stay there. She justified it in her mind by telling herself that this man, this introverted, grumbling skeleton, was not her husband. He was somebody else, a stranger, and what do you owe to a stranger? He had the same memories, sure, the same voice, but illness had changed him. The blood thinners made him loopy. The drugs he took for depression made him glassy. The painkillers made him distant, stumble-tongued. He would call her every morning at six from the nursing home, every night at eleven. He would call her seven times a day. He wanted cigarettes. He needed money. Could she bring him a sandwich? When was she coming to visit? Tomorrow, she’d say. Always tomorrow. Sometimes she’d take a taxi up to the nursing home just to smoke a cigarette with him standing outside under the awning, surrounded by old women in wheelchairs hoping to photosynthesize the January sun.

  She loved him the way you love your own body, and she hated him the same way. The way you hate your body when it fails you, when your heart slows, becomes unreliable, when your hands start to tremble and your lungs stop working the way they used to. She pushed him away, but she never left. She never abandoned him completely. On some level, this made it worse, because pushing him away made her feel guilty, and the guilt made her anxious. It kept her from sleeping. As a result, her own health started to decline. She would lie awake all night imagining the worst. She would hit the bottle earlier and earlier until there was no difference between night and day. She used to say about his illness, only one of us is going to survive this, and I’m not sure it’s going to be me. They had been married for forty years. Their fates were tied. There was no escape for one without the other. It was a riddle without an answer, and wrestling with it year in and year out drove her insane.

  After a while this craziness became just another kind of normal.

  In the doorway she sees a shape moving.

  “Scott?” she says.

  It isn’t. It’s Joe/Roscoe, naked.

  “Can’t sleep?” he says.

  She stares at him. His belly is holding on to his rib cage like a rain-soaked hillside threatening to slide down onto his thighs.

  “You’re naked,” she says.

  He scratches his back.

  “Nude. I’m a nudist. I heard the TV. Do you need anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He comes over, sits on the edge of the bed. His chest hair is a tuft of gray.

  “Your son seems like a good guy,” he says. “A little uptight.”

  She keeps her eyes on the television. It’s been forty years since she saw a man naked who wasn’t her husband.

  “I’d really feel more comfortable,” she says, “if you put some clothes on, a robe.”

  He nods.

  “My wife left me when Cindy was eleven. She ran off with this dry cleaner who had a rock band. It was tough, but we got by.”

  Doris picks up her wineglass, empty. She wonders if these are the kinds of things that are going to start happening to her now that she’s a widow, strange naked men sitting on her bed in the middle of the night, confessing.

  “Cindy’s a champ,” she says.

  Joe/Roscoe nods.

  “Your husband was a good man, it sounds like.”

  “Yes.”

  “The world is so sad sometimes, you know,” he tells her. “But what always gets me through is my friend.”

  “Friends are good to have,” she says, wondering if she should wake Scott up, raise her voice, cry for help. She doesn’t know how these things work. Do people really rape sixty-three-year-old women? Is Roscoe dangerous or just lonely?

  “My friend Jesus Christ,” Roscoe says.

  “Oh,” she says, “him.”

  “Do you know Jesus?”

  “No,” she says. “I mean, not personally.”

  Roscoe runs a hand over his bald dome. The skin under his arm hangs like a chicken wing.

  “I just think—you must be feeling very lost right now,” he tells her. “When my wife left I ate nothing but donuts for two weeks. Cindy and me. We just ate donuts. And then Jesus came into my life. It was a Thursday morning. I hadn’t left the house for ten days. I saw his face on a donut.”

  “Jelly or cream filled?” Doris wants to know.

  If Roscoe hears the question he doesn’t give any indication.

  “He told me not to be so sad. My life wasn’t over. It had only just begun. The world was a beautiful place and it needed me. I had a purpose, a function.”

  “You were young,” she tells him. “I’m too old to start again.”

  “No. That’s not true. We all have something to give. All of us. I know you’re tired. I know nothing makes sense anymore, but I’m here to tell you that if you believe, if you give yourself to him, you will be reborn. Your life will be rich and meaningful.”

  “That sounds great,” she says. “Is there, do you have a pamphlet or something?”
<
br />   “Mom?”

  She turns to look. Scott is standing in the doorway. From his expressions she can tell he has no idea what to make of this scene: Roscoe sitting naked on the edge of her bed. She can read the horror on his face.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I heard voices.”

  “Thank God,” she says. “I mean, come in. Roscoe was just telling me about his friend Jesus.”

  Scott steps into the room, takes Roscoe’s arm.

  “Okay, chief. Time for bed.”

  Roscoe rises reluctantly.

  “I just wanted to offer your mother some consolation,” he says. “You too. I know how hard it can be to lose someone you love.”

  “Offer it walking,” says Scott, applying force. He has never touched a naked man before. Roscoe’s body is slack. His nakedness makes him feel closer, like at any minute parts of him could touch parts of Scott.

  “Jesus understands our sins and forgives them,” says Roscoe. “He feels our pain, because his pain was so much greater. He died so that we might live. All he asks is that we believe.”

  “What I believe?” says Scott, steering Roscoe toward the door. “You should put some pants on when you talk to people.”

  After they’re gone, Doris lies in bed staring at the ceiling. She can feel the flow of oxygen on her face like a lover’s breath. She thinks about crying, but she’s never been much of a crier. The guilt is overwhelming sometimes, all those moments when she wished he would just die already. And then he did.

  Last year, when she was on a respirator, she had the strangest dreams. She was on a hospital ship, cruising the Atlantic. It was a cruise ship filled with sinister Arab men. They were plotting some kind of attack, eyeing her warily. This is what sickness felt like to her, a journey, a paranoid delusion. While her son and husband sat by her bed, she was off in another world, floating, at sea. How strangely the mind works. All these delusions and metaphors.

  Scott comes back, his hair askew.

  “Cindy’s dad, huh?” he says.

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  He goes over to the window. She watches him, her thirty-five-year-old son. Who ever thought she would be so old as to have such a thing. A grown man for a son.

  “Did somebody call before?” she says.

  “It was nothing.”

  “Was it that girl?”

  He shrugs.

  “I hope you told her that reasonable people don’t do things like that, call people at two in the morning.”

  He sighs. Manners are the least of her problems. Looking at him there, standing in the blue light of the television, Doris believes Scott could be her husband, if she squinted. If she caught him out of the corner of her eye. Joe as she’d first met him, before the beard, back when you could still see his dimpled chin. It is a prehistoric memory, excavated from the strata. But then this is what sons do. They replace their fathers.

  “I’m going to bed,” he tells her. “I put a chair in front of Roscoe’s door so he can’t get out.”

  “Isn’t this fun?” Doris says. “Aren’t we having a good time?”

  He kisses her on the forehead and goes back to the sofa.

  She lies there for a long time, watching the headlines cycle on TV. The sky starts to lighten outside. She wonders if she will ever feel anything like joy again.

  When David Henry hears stories of people whose faith drives them to do impossible things, he feels himself welling up with something like pride. Holy men who cross hot coals without getting burned. Sick people healed by prayer. Scientists refer to it as mind over matter. You’ve heard the stories. Ninety-eight-pound mothers lifting cars to rescue their trapped children. They tell them on TV, all the late-night real-estate hucksters urging viewers to visualize success in order to achieve it. They call it the power of positive thinking. David Henry watches the infomercials and docudramas in the dead of night when the rest of his family is asleep. He wants to believe that the human animal is capable of greatness, but deep down he is not so sure.

  David’s son Christopher is studying karate. On Tuesday afternoon David sits on a metal folding chair inside Chris’s karate school, his dojo as Chris calls it, and watches his ten-year-old son prepare to break a wooden board with his fist. He is nervous. All the other kids in the group are so much bigger than Chris—though, of course, this is why they put Chris in the dojo in the first place, because he is small for his age, and the subject of bullying by bigger kids. David has taken the afternoon off work to watch. His brother and mother are arriving in a few hours and he won’t be back to the office for ten days, though he will be reachable by phone and e-mail. He can still be paged, text-messaged, and IM’d. As always, work is his crutch, his escape. Sitting there, he is already inventing reasons to excuse himself from uncomfortable family moments, citing this or that sales memo that has to be revised, this or that crisis that must be addressed.

  He sits in the second row with his eight-year-old daughter, Chloe. She has a single pigtail sticking out from the left side of her head, a sign that Tracey got distracted, probably by a phone call, while dressing her. She’s adorable, David thinks, and not just because she’s my daughter. Chloe has a way of talking that makes you think she’s an absentminded professor trapped in the body of a little girl. There is a similar sensibility and style—that infuriatingly endearing mixture of arcane scientific knowledge and an inability to tie your shoes.

  “Did you know a great-white shark bite is equal to twenty-five thousand pounds of pressure?” she says, kicking her little feet.

  David loosens his tie. The class is going through its warm-up exercises, dozens of little fists punching the air, dozens of little mouths yelling, Hai!

  “Yes,” he says, even though he didn’t. David doesn’t like to be outsmarted, certainly not by an eight-year-old. “Did you know that most fruit flies live for only twenty-four hours?” he says.

  “Duh.”

  He reaches out and rests his hand on the warm little crown of her head. The alarming thing about Chloe, the thing he hasn’t come to terms with yet, is that she is already growing breasts. Eight years old, and her skinny little chest is already starting to sprout. Is it a sign of the apocalypse, he wonders, that children are maturing so young? She’s eight for Christ’s sake. Tracey blames the milk they drink, all the growth hormones. If only they’d bought organic, she says, her little girl would still have four more carefree years before facing the stares and taunts of other children, before anything like a sexual thought should have to come into her head.

  “At least she hasn’t gotten her period yet,” David tells her.

  “Yet,” stresses Tracey, who hunts for red every time she washes her daughter’s underwear. This is the kind of world we live in, thinks David, where everything happens faster than it used to, where nothing follows a predictable course.

  Inside the dojo, Christopher sees his family and waves. Chloe waves back, using her whole arm. She loves her older brother the way some people worship gods. Seeing his son in his white karate uniform, David feels that irrational swell of love. That exuberant terror that comes from loving someone so completely and unconditionally you’re certain they will be killed. It is a baseless fear of losing everything, and no less powerful for its ridiculousness. What would I do? David wonders. How would I survive? At the same time, the boy is such a pain in the ass that sometimes David thinks his head will explode. Unlike his sister, Chris is no brainiac. He’s more physical, turning everything into a weapon or a game. The kind of kid who stays up past his bedtime playing hoops in his room with a trash can and a pair of rolled-up socks. He doesn’t like math or science, isn’t an eager reader. He likes to go out and get dirty, a quality David wishes he could appreciate more. Which is not to say David’s not athletic himself. He loves a good game of catch, a long run, but you need to balance the physical with the mental, he thinks. That’s how you get ahead in this world.

  Right before the show starts, Tracey shows up with Sam, edges her way through the crowd
of housewives to the seat David has saved for her. The baby is bundled up in her arms, as if for winter.

  “Jesus, Trace,” he says, pulling off the baby’s hat, “it’s eighty degrees out. This is L.A., not Anchorage.”

  Tracey collapses into the seat next to him, drops her oversized shoulder bag on the floor. She loves being a mother, but after ten years gives the impression that she still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it.

  “It was cloudy when we left,” she says, shrugging out of her sweater. She is a gorgeous woman still, at thirty-seven, though there are dark sweat stains under the arms of her T-shirt. This is something David has always liked about her. She is a sweater, visceral, animal. Her breasts are big and have yet to drop fully, even after three kids. She rarely wears makeup and when she does it is artfully applied, as if by a freshman to a plastic head at some suburban beauty school. In bed she still bites him hard enough to draw blood.

  “Did I miss anything?” she asks.

  “No. They’re just warming up.”

  The children jump around on mats in the center of the room. Their instructor, a pony-tailed stunt-man wannabe with a Steven Seagal voice, shouts encouragement. The whole thing has that imprecise amateur flavor of all family activities. As a parent you get used to sitting through bad theater, bad music, bad sports. You come to expect a certain level of chaos and inaccuracy. It is endearing to no one else. On the floor, Christopher sees his mother. He grabs the shirtfront of the girl in front of him, steps forward, and throws her over his hip. Hai!

  Look what a big boy I am, he is saying.

  “Hey!” shouts the woman to their immediate left. She comes half out of her seat, like she’s about to sue someone, but when her daughter jumps up laughing, she is forced to settle back and wait for the next offense.

  “They’re just playing,” David reassures her. The woman has her BlackBerry out and is checking her e-mail.