Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  —A True Cat Lover

  Dear Lover:

  Yes, I do understand. And I hate to sound so wishy-washy, but you both have a point. If I had to choose, however, I’d come down on the side of your (smart and obviously also willful) vet. Look at it like this: Swap the word “control” for the word “convince.” We shouldn’t want to control our pets any more than we want to control our friends or our mates. It’s not simply that having control over someone is just too much responsibility; it’s ultimately not very satisfying. But we do want to be with someone we can “convince.” Wouldn’t you like to have your cat want to hop up on the bed to get petted? Don’t you want Goya to let you scratch his belly without biting or clawing you, even if it’s in fun? Animals need to learn. Animals need to be socialized. Then, when they are, they can decide to have or not have the kind of relationship with us that they want. And we can decide how hard we want to work to convince them to play with us and listen to us and love us. It’s a fine line to walk, but it’s a line that has to be respected and a stroll that needs to be taken or no one will ever be satisfied. And one final thing, Lover (I do like saying that, I must admit): Every one of our pets is socialized to some degree; don’t pretend otherwise. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t want to get anywhere near their claws or their teeth. They’d be too unpredictable, too dangerous. I do understand, by the way, that unpredictable plus dangerous can be an appealing combination, in both humans and pets. But only up to a point. Once that point is passed, there are only two possibilities: (1) We get our hearts broken; (2) We wind up as food.

  —Dr. Bob

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10

  ISADORE BARNES

  Isadore was a thirty-five-year-old Trinidadian woman who looked as if she were sixteen. But I knew she couldn’t be sixteen because within months of my treating the gray-and-white ragamuffin of a cat she’d rescued from the street, she told me she had an eighteen-year-old daughter. She saw my astonished look—when she’d mentioned a daughter, I was figuring four or five, maybe eight years old, tops—and said in the clearest, most mellifluous island accent imaginable, without a hint of embarrassment, shame, or pain, “Oh, I was raped when I was fifteen.”

  I muttered the usual things—“Oh my god” and “I’m so sorry”—but she just smiled beatifically and said, “I thought it was a terrible thing at the time. But it gave me my daughter, and I love her more than anything in the world, so I don’t think it’s so terrible anymore.”

  Isadore had very little education and not much money, but she was determined that her daughter would have every chance at success. So Isadore worked several jobs and had since the girl was born; now Lena, the daughter, was about to start college. Isadore practically burst with pride when she told me that.

  “She has never gotten into any trouble,” she said. “She is a wonderful student. And now she’s going to college. Can you imagine that? College.” She said the word as if it were some kind of magical incantation. “In Boston,” she said. “College in Boston. I have never been to Boston, have you?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “It sounds like a wonderful place.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure it will be for Lena.”

  Isadore worked hard, but she could never land a job that seemed worthy of her smarts and skills. She loved taking care of people, and she had long dreamed of becoming a nurse.

  “You should go to school, too,” I said. “To become a nurse. You’d be a great nurse.”

  “I don’t have any money, Dr. Bob. To be a nurse, you need money. Maybe when Lena is finished in Boston. Maybe then she can support me and I can help everybody in the world get healthy.” She broke into a huge laugh. She had an incredible laugh—it made the whole world seem like one big entertainment.

  Everyone worried about Isadore except Isadore. She lived in a dangerous neighborhood in the Bronx and never had a penny. Sometimes she didn’t show up for appointments because she didn’t want to spend the money on a subway ride. She couldn’t ever seem to hold a job for more than a few months. I once asked Lucy, who loved Isadore, why the woman couldn’t keep a job.

  “Does she drink?” I asked. “Take drugs? What the hell is it? She seems so smart and lovely.”

  “She’s too smart,” Lucy said. “People hire her for low-level jobs and she’s smarter than they are. It makes them uncomfortable after a while.”

  Chalk up another one for the nonhumans. Rarely do pets reject one of their own because they’re too smart.

  We hired Isadore from time to time to substitute for Lucy or to help her out. She was indeed smart. And nice and competent and without any apparent flaws, either personally or professionally.

  One day, she was helping Lucy with office paperwork and filing—Isadore was also extremely adept on the computer, which Lucy most definitely was not—when a golden retriever was brought in with a badly mangled leg. She’d been hit by a car and was in extreme pain. The dog was carried in by her owner and two strangers who’d seen the accident, taken off various pieces of clothing to wrap around the poor creature, and helped get her to the clinic. The dog was howling and whimpering, and when I got near the wound to give her a shot to help deaden the pain, she snapped at me, taking a nice little chunk out of the fleshy part of my hand.

  It was not a happy operation—lots of blood and hysteria. The entire experience was very emotional for everyone involved, from the doctor to the patient to the patient’s owner to the Good Samaritans who’d injected themselves into the situation. After it was over—the retriever lived but would have a substantial limp the rest of her life—I found Isadore crying in the short hallway behind Lucy’s usual seat.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “The dog’s gonna be okay. She’ll be fine.”

  “You’re a good doctor,” Isadore said.

  “I’m just a doctor,” I said.

  “No, no, that dog bit you hard and you didn’t care. I once saw a little baby bite her own mother and the mother slapped her so hard, she almost took the baby’s head off.”

  “The dog was in pain. She didn’t mean to bite me.”

  “That baby didn’t mean to bite his mommy, either.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Isadore. Pain makes people do strange things. Animals, too.”

  “I can’t stand seeing people when they hurt,” she said. “I just want to make people feel better.”

  “That’s a good thing,” I told her.

  “No,” she said. “Not really. Because no one lets me. No one lets me make them feel better.”

  “How ’bout your daughter? Lena lets you.”

  “Yes. And Lena’s leaving now.”

  “But she’s only able to leave because you were so good to her. Because you made her feel so good for eighteen years.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But she’s still leaving. And I have nobody to help now.”

  I nodded and gave her a little hug. I felt bad for Isadore, but it made me happy to know someone whose main worry in life was that she needed more people to take care of.

  * * *

  The next few months of my life were, to put it mildly, un-fucking-real.

  My mother’s recovery was an extraordinary thing to behold. The doctors had told me she wouldn’t talk or move again. She was talking and moving within three days. They’d told me she wouldn’t walk; a week later she was walking. They’d also told me that she would probably have to spend the rest of her life in a nursing home. My mother, when she got that bit of news, raised her left hand—the one she could lift without too much of a struggle—and crooked her index finger at me to draw me closer, and when I leaned in, she said as clearly as she could muster, “If I have to spend the rest of my life in a place with old, sick people, just smother me with a pillow now.” I promised her I’d let her know when that particular decision had to be made.

  I stayed upstate for five more days after Elizabeth left. Not long before I was about to head back to the city, the hospital said they were kicking my m
om out. She would have to leave in three days.

  “You’re kidding,” I said to the social worker who broke the news to me. “What the hell is she going to do? She can’t live in her house. She can barely move.”

  The woman explained that since my mother had stabilized, she was no longer the hospital’s responsibility. She told me that my mom needed to go to a rehab center, where she would either get better or get progressively worse. If she got better, she could so home. If she got worse, she’d stay there until it was pillow time. To be fair, that was my interpretation; the social worker made it clear that any good rehab center would take loving care of any patient until he or she passed on to a better place.

  Somehow I managed to hold my tongue. The struggle to ignore the pious assurance that there was a “better place” collided with the thought of trying to deal all by myself with a woman who couldn’t feed herself or go to the bathroom without assistance. That put me in something of a tizzy, and I think the social worker noticed my inner turmoil because she hastily gave me a list of local rehab centers as well as several in Manhattan and then explained to me in some detail exactly what I needed to ask when I went to check out each institution. I left her office a bit shell-shocked and called Camilla. She said she’d call me right back and, despite my paranoid concern that I wouldn’t hear from her for days, she called back in fifteen minutes with the names of three good nursing homes in Manhattan.

  I told my mother what was going on and said I was going back to the city in the morning to try to get her set up. It made more sense to have her in rehab, where I could keep an eye on her. She fought back a bit—she wanted to stay close to her home—but she eased off when I told her that if she did well in rehab it would make it a lot easier for her to get back into her own house sooner rather than later.

  Rocky and I spent one final night at the ol’ homestead. I made an omelet for myself and cooked him some shrimp and broccoli rabe as a special treat (he loved broccoli rabe). I tried to feel sentimental when I left in the morning, telling myself that in a literal sense I was about to close the door on my past when I turned the key and put it back under the mat, but the sentiment didn’t come. That door had been closed a long time ago, either when I realized that the family of my adulthood was not the family of my childhood or when the Lawrence Taylor poster had been taken off my bedroom wall and demolished. Or maybe it was when I realized that I’d spent years rooting my New York Giants heart out for a drug-crazed child molester.

  By early afternoon I was back in my apartment. The guys were delighted to have me and Rocky home safe and sound. By late afternoon, I’d visited the three nursing homes Camilla had recommended. The first two places were horrifying. In the first joint, my mother would have been put in a room the size of a steamer trunk with a roommate who was attached to some kind of breathing device. I stayed in the room for about ten minutes, trying to imagine anyone I knew, much less my own mother, stuck in such a place. At one point, the nurse showing me around said, “Mrs. Lapner would be a very quiet roommate for your mother.” Since the woman in the tiny bed hadn’t moved since I’d been there, I said to the nurse, “That’s because I think Mrs. Lapner’s dead.”

  The second place was a little better but not much. For four hundred dollars a night, my mother would get round-the-clock care, three hot meals, and at least two cockroaches under her bed. I’m sure there were more roaches capable of making an appearance, but that was the number I saw before I got the hell out of the place.

  The third one was a winner. Quiet, clean, and my mother could get a private room, at least for two or three weeks. I needed to figure out the insurance issues, but I felt sure I could make this work. She could live in this place without feeling as if she were dying in this place.

  By dinnertime, I was in bed with Camilla. We made love—there was the same urgency and passion and sexy kinkiness, but this time no postcoital crying or depression or anger; there was even a sense of affection and tenderness on her part—and then ordered in Chinese food and beer. We ate and drank in bed and talked until well past midnight. I still had questions I would have liked answered—why she hadn’t called me back the first several days I was upstate was paramount in my mind—but there was a delicate balance to whatever was happening with us, and I didn’t want to upset that balance. I did tell her about everything that had happened while I was gone: the first days at the hospital, my mother’s surprising recovery, my blowup and rant at dinner, the breakup with Elizabeth. She absorbed it all and seemed to relish hearing the details of a life she was just getting to know and understand. I didn’t get much feedback in return, though. I decided that for the moment I was satisfied to have earned her interest in my life. I’d earn her willingness to share her own life sometime later.

  I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to spend the night. So somewhere around one A.M., I said that I should probably go home and walk the critters. She said, “Okay,” without any emotion whatsoever. I then said, while pulling on my socks, that I could come back after they were walked so I could spend the night with her if she wanted, and she said, “Okay,” in the same exact tone. But when I looked over at her she flashed me a smile, and it gave me the same sensation I’d experienced when I saw her for the first time on the street, when she’d waved at me from half a block away. There was enormous pleasure in her smile, and it made me light-headed to know that I was the one providing that pleasure.

  I strolled home, walked and played with the animals that needed walking and playing with—they did seem a bit confused; they were used to a lot more attention, especially Rocky—and then headed back to Camilla’s as quickly as I could. She was under the duvet when I returned, shivering slightly because she’d gotten up to buzz me in. I stripped down and hopped into bed beside her. We wrapped our arms around each other, kissed, and held on as tightly as we could. Her naked flesh was so firm and smooth and soft, I felt I could disappear into it. We fell asleep clutching each other and woke up the same way.

  Her cat slept on the bed with us. When Camilla woke up, seeing the little critter there startled her more than seeing me in the exact same position she’d seen me in six hours earlier. She burrowed under the duvet, sighed contentedly, and smiled. The cat came up and plopped down on my shoulder. Camilla hesitated, then reached out from under the cover and petted him.

  “I still don’t like him,” she said. “I still don’t see the point of him.”

  I shrugged and Rags kept on purring. It might have been the loudest purring I’ve ever heard.

  * * *

  Two days after that, an ambulance brought my mother down to New York and into rehab. She was pleased with the choice of the facility, although as soon as we were alone she said, “I’m not staying here long.” I said that was up to her. And that first night, she was forced to walk, speak, and feed herself. To her, this was the equivalent of full-contact preseason football scrimmages in the NFL: pure torture but necessary if one wants to make the team.

  The next morning I paced around my apartment for ten minutes, took a deep breath, and called Ted. It went quickly to voice mail. Rattled—I wasn’t prepared to simply leave a message saying that our mom had had a stroke—I heard my voice turn overly serious as I asked him to call me back as soon as he could. When I hung up, I realized that if I picked up a message like that, I’d assume someone had died. So I immediately called back and told him not worry, that no one had died but he should still call me. I hung up, called back again, and said, “Oh shit, this is ridiculous. I’m calling because Mom had a stroke. It’s very serious but she’s fine. I’ve taken care of everything. She’s in a rehab place in the city; I can give you all the info when you call me back. I know she’d like to talk to you and see you. Sorry to have to tell you this in a message.”

  I never heard back from him.

  I e-mailed him a day later, writing a more cogent version of the scattershot messages I’d left by phone. No e-mail came in return. A few days later, I went up to the rehab clinic to visit my mom�
��she was having to learn to eat again; they were teaching her how to swallow solid food, so I usually brought her milk shakes and pudding and better versions of hospital food that she could easily ingest—and I told her that I’d been trying to reach Teddy to tell him what had happened but that I hadn’t had any luck.

  “Called me,” she rasped.

  “What?”

  She nodded.

  I couldn’t believe it. I thought she had to be confused. “Teddy called you? Are you sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “How’d he know where you were?”

  This one was hard. “Friend,” she said.

  “His friend?”

  She shook her head.

  “Your friend?”

  A nod.

  “Who the hell does he know who’s your friend?”

  She stared at me. She’d given me all the help she could give.

  “From back home? A neighbor from home?”

  A head shake.

  “In the city?”

  Another shake.

  “In California?”

  She nodded.

  “Who the hell could it be? Wait a second. Mimi and Fred?”

  My mother nodded and breathed a shallow sigh of relief.

  Mimi and Fred Stiles were old friends of my parents’. She was an actress and he wrote bad sitcoms. She’d also started her own religion. She owned a building called the Church of the Good, and the slogan over the entryway was “Put God Back in Good.” Even her husband thought she was a nut, but they’d been true friends to my mom after my father died. I’d called them after she’d had her stroke, figuring they’d worry if they called and didn’t hear back. I’d also e-mailed them when I’d chosen the rehab center and asked them to let her friends know what had happened and where she’d be. Mimi said she’d pray for us. She didn’t say anything about Teddy, though. I realized that what must have happened was that they’d called him before I’d left my string of voice mail messages, and he must have gotten furious that I’d excised him from the entire process. For a moment I felt a surge of guilt, but then I shrugged it off. I wasn’t trying to exclude him. I was just waiting until I thought my mother was strong enough to survive his inclusion.