Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

“What?”

  “You’re so shocked?”

  “No. I mean … I was wondering, but…”

  “We have a pretty crazy relationship. And I found out last week that he’s been seeing a friend of mine on the side, the prick.”

  “Not much of a friend.”

  “No. Not much of a boyfriend, either. Actually, that’s not true. He’s pretty great. He’s just a prick.”

  “So … what am I? Payback?”

  “Yes,” she said. “At least you were last week.”

  I didn’t say anything. Focused on breathing slowly in and out.

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t give a shit.”

  We kissed for a long time; then all she said was: “The shoes.”

  I kicked my shoes off and we kissed some more. Then she said, “Socks.” I pulled them off as quickly as I could, and that’s the way it went. She would tell me to remove one piece of clothing and after I did, we’d roll on the bed and touch and kiss, and then she’d tell me to get rid of the next item. Luckily, I wasn’t wearing layers of clothing, so it didn’t take all that long before we were both naked. And as soon as we were, I was inside her and we were making love and then she was shaking and shivering and crying again.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  She shook her head after both questions. Quick, firm, dismissive shakes. And before I could ask or do anything else she said, “Just hold me and go to sleep.”

  It felt so natural to be there with her. I was still confused, still wondering who and what she really was, but I didn’t truly care. I just wanted to do exactly what she told me to do, which was hold her and go to sleep and be with her all night long.

  That is exactly what I did. And I did it until my cell phone rang, around five o’clock in the morning. Camilla stirred as I left the bed and searched for my pants. Once I found them, I tried to dig the ringing phone out of my left front pocket. I was sure it was Elizabeth and I didn’t have a clue what I’d do—if I’d answer or click off. But it was too early for Elizabeth to call, and when I looked at the caller ID it was an upstate number. The same area code as my hometown, but not a number I recognized.

  So I answered, saying a wary “Hello,” and a woman’s voice on the other end said, “Is this Bob Heller?”

  I said yes and she said, “This is Marta Hendrix.”

  It took me a moment. “Marta as in my mother’s next-door neighbor?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t know how to tell you this. But last night around eleven o’clock, I came home. I was visiting my daughter in Buffalo and the train was delayed and … well, I noticed that your mother’s newspaper was on the front stoop, which isn’t normal—she takes it in as soon as she gets up. But the light was on. And I knew she wasn’t away. So I knocked on the door and—”

  “Marta,” I said. “Is my mother okay?”

  “She’s had a stroke,” she said. “A big one. I don’t know how long she’d been there, she was lying on the floor in the kitchen, but it was a while. I think because the paper was there maybe all day. Or even twenty-four hours. The ambulance came and took her to the hospital. I went with her and I just got home. Your apartment number’s listed, but you weren’t there and I didn’t have your cell number. I just got home and I went into your mom’s house and I found your cell phone number in her address book.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Well, she’s alive,” Marta said. “I don’t know if that’s the same as okay.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know either.”

  * * *

  There was a car rental place not too far from my apartment, but it didn’t open until seven A.M. Driving would be faster than flying; it would also be easier on my peace of mind than waiting for a train. Camilla woke up and slipped out from under her duvet (she just had a bottom sheet and slept under only the quilted duvet). She was naked, and she came to me unself-consciously and hugged me. We sat next to each other, her legs and feet once again tucked under her, and I apologized to her several times—for waking her up, for dragging my personal problems into her apartment—until she told me, very gently, to shut up. She seemed to realize that she was naked at that moment, went to a bedroom closet, and pulled out a blue silk robe that came down to her mid-thigh. She tightened the belt around her waist, came back to sit next to me, held my hand, and asked me questions about my mom for half an hour. I saw why she was a good doctor: I immediately felt under her care. Her touch was comforting and warm, her voice soft and caring, and I could tell that she was, to some extent, absorbing my pain. What I wanted to do was kiss her neck and her shoulders and then get back into bed with her, our bodies wrapped together. Instead I told her I should go home and get ready to head upstate. At the door, she kissed me lightly on the lips and told me that after I spoke to my mother’s doctors I should call her with any questions.

  Back in my apartment, I showered and changed my clothes, lost in a reverie of sadness and disbelief about my mom and quiet exhilaration about the woman with whom I was quickly falling in love. I hurriedly walked Scully, Wave, and Che, impatiently urging them to do what needed to be done, rushed back inside to feed and briefly pet all the guys, nodded in agreement when Larry called me a cocksucker, and gathered Rocky up and put him in his traveling bag. The others could be alone, and I could be without the others. But Rocky was going to be with me.

  At seven o’clock, on the dot, I was at the car rental place, and at seven-fifteen I was on the road, driving north in a silver Toyota. I felt as if I were driving in a Twilight Zone episode about a world of conformity, because every other car on the road looked exactly like mine. At seven-thirty I called Elizabeth. She started to ask me where I’d been, said she’d called last night and left a message. I stayed silent for as long as I could manage; then all I said was “My mother had a stroke. I’m driving up to see her.”

  That ended any possible discussion and erased all suspicions. I told her I was driving to the hospital and would play everything by ear once I got there, but that I’d probably spend at least a few days upstate and would most likely stay at my mother’s house. Elizabeth didn’t miss a beat: She was instantly caring, supportive, and organized. She would call ahead, get the attending doctor’s name, and let him know that I’d be coming. She would use her contacts at Cornell’s med school to find and then talk with their stroke expert. She volunteered to meet me at the hospital and help out in whatever way possible, but I told her it would be best to wait and see what happened once I got there. In truth, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to handle whatever the situation turned out to be without having to either lean on or fend off anyone else. I also just wanted to be by myself to try to sort out my thoughts about my past and present. And possibly future.

  I called Lucy to tell her what had happened and ask her to take care of my guys and figure out how to get an emergency replacement at the clinic for the next few days. After that I was pretty much of a blank slate for the three-plus hour drive. I plugged in my iPad and blared rock and roll for much of the ride, occasionally switching to opera when I felt my brain cells deadening but mostly sticking with the Stones, Florence and the Machine, Pearl Jam, and, as my way of rebelling against Elizabeth and women in general, about twenty minutes of Meat Loaf. By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and reached the automatic door leading to the lobby, I was in a weirdly good mood. Mick Jagger and Eddie Vedder had cleared my head of all thoughts of lust, sadness, or longing. I just wanted to find out what the hell was going on with my mom and figure out what the hell I could do about it.

  The answers to both questions were, in order, a lot and not much. But like with any visit to a hospital where the situation is critical, by the time I left to get some dinner, I was exhausted, discouraged, enraged, and impressed.

  My mother had suffered a massive stroke in the dead center of her brain. The doctors believed that it had happened sometime between six A.M., about the tim
e she usually woke up, and eight A.M., when the newspaper was usually delivered to her house. They told me that to have any sort of reasonable recovery from this kind of stroke, my mom needed to have been discovered and tended to within two hours. Instead, she’d been lying on the floor of her kitchen in a puddle of her own urine, unable to move and going in and out of consciousness for approximately seventeen hours. As a result, the young doctors told me, she would very likely have locked-in syndrome, which meant she would never talk or move again.

  Marta, her neighbor, told me that in addition to the hours she’d spent sprawled on the kitchen floor, my mother had lain for several hours on a gurney in the hallway of the hospital, waiting for an MRI of her brain. Marta had stayed with her until she’d finally gotten into a room. It wasn’t a private room. She was sharing with an elderly black woman who moaned constantly and never quietly and occasionally let loose with a scream that could bring the house down.

  I made my way to my mom’s room, walked past the moaning black woman, and saw my mother. She appeared to be sleeping, her mouth partway open, her right arm outside the blanket, bent at the elbow and tight against her side, her right fist curled into a ball that looked as if it would never uncurl. Her eyes moved slightly as I stepped into her line of vision.

  She looked as if she’d lost fifty pounds and any sense of normal human life. From what the doctors had told me, I was expecting her to be in a near-vegetative state, and that’s certainly what it seemed like at first glance. Her hair was stringy and flat. Her skin had had a dull greenish hue. Sweat dripped down her neck, and snot hung from one nostril. But when I took her left hand—her good hand—and said, “Well … I’ve seen you look worse,” my mom let loose with a raspy “haw” that was clearly a laugh. She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Can you believe it?” and I laughed back at her.

  At the time, I had no understanding of my mom’s extraordinary strength and no idea of what she’d be able to accomplish over the next few months. All I knew was that a woman who happened to be my mother—someone I was close to and loved but ultimately didn’t know all that well—had suffered a serious stroke and now stared up at me from a near-fetal position on the bed. She looked like she’d been run over by a truck, sprayed with a fire hose to clean her up, and dropped off at the hospital in a laundry bag.

  Rocky and I sat with her for several hours. Cats were forbidden in the hospital, but no one seemed to notice that I had one. Intermittently I spoke to doctors and nurses, all of whom told me something worse than the previous doctor or nurse. I got a rundown of the planned treatment, which was basically to wait two or three days to see how the swelling in her brain went down and then determine the level of therapy she’d be capable of. Until they saw the actual physical damage done by the stroke, the doctors couldn’t give me much information (other than their dire predictions). I asked why it had happened, and as near as they could tell from the blood tests they’d taken and the brief conversation they’d had with her family doctor, my mother had been on blood pressure medicine designed to limit the potential for a stroke (for which she’d been at risk—news that came as a complete surprise to me). The medicine worked so well and she was feeling so chipper, she stopped taking it. Result: major stroke. One of the doctors told me that as people got older, this sort of thing happened fairly often. They wanted to believe that they could be healthy and young on their own. So as soon as they felt well, they destroyed themselves by eliminating the thing that made them feel well.

  My patients never did this. They did not have self-destructive or self-delusional instincts. They happily and gratefully accepted whatever was good for them. I was also pretty sure that dogs and cats and small rodents and large horses never burst into tears after making love. Or stayed up at night worrying that they had barked, meowed, twitched, or neighed something stupid to a member of the opposite sex. I had the urge to call Camilla and tell her this: There was a lot to be said for the animal side of the pets-versus-people argument. At that moment, the people side was not a case I’d have liked to argue before the Supreme Court.

  The nurses asked me to leave at eight o’clock. If I’d resisted they probably would have let me stay, but there was no real purpose to my sticking around. My mother was mostly sleeping, and the black woman’s moans were getting louder and more regular. I asked if there was any way for my mom to be moved and one nurse said it probably wouldn’t be necessary, that the black woman would most likely be gone by tomorrow. The nurse who told me this finally seemed to notice the cat in the room. She eyed him suspiciously, but before she could say anything, I said, “He’s a therapy cat. I have permission to bring him in.” She shrugged—people always shrug in relief when told they don’t have to be responsible for a decision—and left without saying another word.

  I drove with Rocky toward my childhood home, stopping along the way at a Taco Bell in a dismal mall that had gone up fifteen or so years earlier and had been in steady decline ever since. I got the fast food back to my car and just sat there, unable to either restart the engine or unwrap the vaguely burrito-like thing I’d paid nearly four bucks for. Eventually, I managed to muster the energy to drive the remaining few miles home. Good neighbor Marta Hendrix had left a key for me under the mat, and I used it on the front door. I hadn’t been inside the house in years, and I’d never been in the house when it was this absolutely still and quiet and dark. I reached for the living room light, muscle memory getting my hand to the switch on the first try.

  I saw my childhood through the shadows cast by the lamp and sat down heavily on the couch. I’d called Camilla twice from the hospital, stepping away from my mother’s room; both times I’d left voice messages. And now I left a third one. I said, “It’s Bob,” and realized how exhausted my voice sounded. “I … I just felt like calling you. Sorry if I’m being a pest. I won’t be up too late tonight, so maybe we’ll talk tomorrow.” I clicked the phone off and sat in silence for several minutes, almost drifting off.

  But suddenly I didn’t want the silence. Eight hours in a hospital made me want to reach out to living, breathing people. I called Phil, realizing that not only was he close by, he’d want to know what had happened. (Over the years, he’d checked in on my mom periodically, stopping by to chat or to help her with something that needed to be repaired. His visits made her happy, reminded her of a simpler and less fractured life.) I called the bowling alley, but he’d gone home. Called his cell but got his voice mail. I briefly explained what had happened and told him to call me in the morning, because even though I was in the midst of calling him, I was too tired to really talk that night.

  I sat, phone in hand, for several minutes before dialing Elizabeth’s number. I could hear myself saying to Camilla that I wasn’t afraid of being alone. But right now I was, and though Rocky sat curled in my lap, I needed more than a sweet and brilliant cat. I needed comfort, so I went to the only place where I absolutely knew I would get it.

  Elizabeth heard the heaviness in my voice and listened quietly while I filled her in. “You sound tired,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I can come there on Friday morning,” she told me. “If you’d like me to.”

  “I don’t think there’s all that much that can be done,” I said. “I don’t know what you can do if you come.”

  “I can take care of you,” she said.

  I looked at my burrito, still wrapped in paper and now nearly cold.

  “I’ll see you Friday,” I said softly.

  I ate my burrito, went up to the room I’d slept in as a child—which now was some kind of combination guest room–sewing room; my single bed had been replaced by a couch that converted to a pull-out bed, and my teenage posters of Lawrence Taylor and Michelle Pfeiffer had been replaced by a wall of family photos and a painting that my dad had worked on laboriously during the year he’d spent deciding it was a good thing to be painting bad abstract art—and managed to plug in my cell and kick my shoes off before passing out fully dressed. I slep
t nearly twelve hours, and when I woke up it took me a few moments to realize where I was and what had happened. Then I got out of bed and tried to conjure a plan. The best I could come up with was to brush my teeth (a miracle: I’d remembered a toothbrush and toothpaste), change my clothes, and go back to the hospital.

  Over the next few days, my routine was simple. I spent from ten A.M. to eight P.M. either in my mother’s room or in various hospital offices talking to doctors, social workers, therapists, or administrators. They were all nice, seemingly competent, and dispassionate, except for the primary social worker, who was very concerned that I do the right things and explained precisely what I needed to do to make sure my mother got the best care possible. For the first two days, I called Camilla two or three times a day and each time left messages on her voice mail. The third day, I left one message. I didn’t get any calls in return.

  For three days, there was almost no change in my mother’s condition. The physical therapists tried to get her to move but didn’t have much luck. The speech therapist tried to get her to talk but, other than a few incoherent syllables, got nowhere. Phil came by to sit with us—me, my mother, and Rocky—for a couple of hours each day. At night he and Rocky and I went to the bowling alley, where Phil and I drank beer and ate burgers and hot dogs while Rocky prowled the lanes before settling in at the shoe desk, where he was petted incessantly by the very attractive high school girl who worked there.

  “It’s gotta be strange,” Phil said to me one night in between bites of an excellent cheeseburger.

  “What is?”

  “It’s like your return to childhood except everything’s turned upside down. Your mom’s like a two-year-old. Can’t feed herself, can barely talk. Your job is to take care of her the way she used to take care of you. It’s like one big surreal cycle.”

  I nodded, had another beer, and debated talking to him about Camilla. I was desperate to, but I held back. For one thing, Phil knew Elizabeth. Not well but we’d had several dinners together and he liked her. It somehow would have been demeaning to Elizabeth to discuss another woman with him. For another thing, I didn’t know what I would say. Camilla still hadn’t called me back, and her silence was eating me up. I didn’t think it would make for much of a conversation if I described a relationship with a woman who wouldn’t return my calls.