Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  In med school, she realized that she was drawn to the patients who were seriously wounded or dying. Stabbings, car crashes, suicide attempts—that’s what she wanted to be around and surrounded by. And one night, drinking in a bar on the Upper East Side, telling her story to some advertising guy who was dreaming of getting into her pants, she realized that she wasn’t drawn to dying patients. She was drawn to death.

  She went home to her barely furnished studio apartment, got into a warm bath, and took a kitchen knife with her. She imagined that it was identical to the knife her father had used to kill her mother. She drank most of a bottle of gin and prepared to slit her wrists, sink into the water, and join her parents. But something held her back; she didn’t know if it was cowardice or if she just wasn’t ready, but the final urge to end her life never came. She stayed in the tub for six hours, until the water was cold and her teeth were chattering. Then she got out, padded naked into the kitchen, put the knife back in its proper drawer, and fell asleep on the unmade mattress in the middle of the floor.

  The next day she got in touch with Médecins sans Frontières. When she learned that she needed to spend a year in a big-city emergency room if she wanted to work for them, she didn’t hesitate. She slogged through twelve grueling months at a New York hospital’s ER and gained the experience that would enable her to put herself directly into the hands of death.

  As soon as she had the necessary qualifications, Camilla headed to the Congo and the center of the fighting in North Kivu. She worked amid gunfire and explosions and saw friends and patients murdered in front of her eyes. She treated soldiers who’d been shot and babies who hadn’t eaten in days and small children whose limbs had been blown off. She had a torrid affair with a Spanish doctor named Alex García and thought she was in love with him. Then she discovered that, in the midst of their romance, he’d also started sleeping with a friend of hers, a nurse who’d been working with them in the Rutshuru hospital. It was another betrayal, but she’d already come to understand that she didn’t love him. He only came to life when surrounded by death. It was what excited him and motivated him and sustained him. She had begun to thirst for something else. She had seen enough; something invincibly alive had sprouted within her. Now Camilla wanted to run from death. She wanted to run from betrayal. So she came back to New York, a place where she felt she might belong, and sublet a friend’s small apartment for a modest amount of money and a promise to take care of a cat named Rags.

  She met me. I fell in love with her. She wanted to fall in love with me. But although she was on the run from her dark side, she hadn’t escaped it altogether. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that love and family didn’t go hand in hand with betrayal. She was caught in the middle, pulled apart by two magnets of equal strength. One magnet was everything she had experienced and knew to be true. The other was me.

  My family fell apart because of neuroses and competition and fears that played out and festered over decades. But, thanks in large part to Anna, my family didn’t destroy me or even come close. My brother lied and cut a wide swath of destruction, and my parents were sometimes hurtful and caused some inadvertent harm, but in the end, all it added up to was the kind of normal, everyday, distasteful human behavior that makes the world go round. Camilla’s family blew itself apart and shattered a lovely little girl.

  What happened to my family was a war game. What happened to Camilla’s was a real war.

  We were two people incapable of escaping our ghosts. My ghost was so perfect that she made the past so much better—incomparably better—than the present. Camilla’s ghost was so murderous that he tried to kill his child’s future.

  And there we were.

  * * *

  While Camilla and I were trying to convince ourselves that we could overcome the entanglements of the past, my mother was trying to come to terms with the enormous burden of what her future might be. It was an extraordinary thing to watch, especially because, at least to me, it was so unexpected. Perhaps the biggest surprise one can have is when you’ve known someone for your entire life, then discover that you don’t actually know her at all.

  My mother’s doctor told me that he’d never seen willpower remotely comparable to hers. She refused to succumb to her fate. She didn’t get depressed. She didn’t get angry. She didn’t yield to the physical or mental obstacles thrown directly in her path. She just went about her business—which, I began to realize, was what she’d been doing her (and my) entire life.

  I was told that my mother would likely be in the rehab center for at least six months to a year, if she ever got out at all. Exactly three months later, I installed a motorized seat that attached to the stairway railing in my building; the next day, my mother moved into the third-floor apartment. I had cleaned up the apartment as much as possible and shipped a lot of Marjorie’s more esoteric items—a totem pole from a South Seas island; teacups with pictures of all the key Disney characters (as well as a teapot shaped like Goofy; the lid had ears as floppy as ceramic ears could be); a nutcracker shaped like a naked woman (the nuts were cracked between her legs)—down to her in Florida. Marjorie’s New York trips had become less and less frequent, and when she came she rarely stayed in the garret anymore. It was too hard a climb, so she stayed in a hotel instead.

  Having an extra apartment as a spare storeroom was a ridiculous luxury in Manhattan, so in came my mom. And to live with her and be her aide, I hired Isadore, the very special Trinidadian who only wanted to care for and help people. My mother needed plenty of help and care: She couldn’t walk by herself or go to the bathroom by herself or cook or clean. Isadore happily moved out of her Bronx apartment and into the brownstone on Greenwich Avenue. She couldn’t believe her luck. She was now living in a beautiful apartment and had someone new to love and look after.

  I remembered Phil’s words when my mom was in the hospital. He was right: This was like a surreal version of my childhood. Life had begun to come full circle. I had in no way escaped my family; I had only reconfigured it. I was now living with one dead wife, one dead father, one stroke-ridden mother, and one semi-missing brother. And I was in the midst of a serious relationship with a living, breathing, fully functioning woman with whom I’d fallen in love and who wouldn’t see me two days in a row.

  It all seemed fairly normal to me.

  Camilla’s first encounter with my mother was quite different from Anna’s. My mom was fairly aphasic now. Her memory was perfect; she simply couldn’t come up with a lot of pesky nouns or proper names. Conversation was difficult at times, although with enough patience we could get where we needed to go. Sometimes her words flowed easily; sometimes she struggled to come up with the simplest of questions or statements. But she never stopped pushing herself. I’d go downstairs to my apartment, and two hours later the phone would ring.

  “Do you have a new dog?” she’d ask. Her voice had become weaker since the stroke. It quivered a bit, as if the effort of stringing words together was strangling her vocal cords.

  “Is that what you wanted to ask me earlier?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t. Why do you think so?”

  “There was a dog in the … you know … where I come in.”

  “The stairway.”

  “Yes. I’d never seen him before.”

  “What kind was it?” I knew she’d have trouble with that one. But the doctor had told me to keep peppering her with specific questions so her brain would keep working hard.

  “It was a … a … oh, god, I hate this.”

  “Describe it.”

  “It was blue.”

  “Really? Blue?”

  “No. Not blue. Didn’t mean blue. Light-colored. Like at the beach.”

  “Tan?”

  “Yes. It was tan.”

  “Like light brown?”

  “Yes. And long hair.”

  “Was it big?”

  “No. The size of Hilts.”

  “Hilts? That’d be a pony.”
/>   “Not Hilts now! Young.”

  “How old? Five?”

  “Younger.”

  “A baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. A small, light brown dog with long hair.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was pretty impressive—you nailed it. It was a cocker spaniel. I was treating it, but the owner let it run out the door and into the hallway. It’s not mine.”

  “Oh. Good. You have enough dogs. Time to have a real one.”

  “A real dog?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. You know what I mean.”

  “A baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m hanging up on you now, Mom.”

  “I knew you would.”

  Over breakfast one morning I asked her if she’d always been this stubborn. She nodded.

  “Living with your father,” she said. “Had to be stubborn.”

  “Why?”

  “He was part-time husband. Part-time father. Not easy holding things together.”

  “You did a good job,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. Didn’t do good with Ted.”

  “Why not?”

  “Made mistakes. Was too afraid.”

  “Too afraid of what?”

  “Of making mistakes.”

  She laughed at herself after that. It was a rueful laugh, but it was genuine. I think my mother got funnier after her stroke.

  So when I finally introduced her to Camilla, my mother was in some respects a different woman than the one who’d met Anna. In some ways she was diminished; in most ways she was much more secure and understanding and generous.

  She and Camilla hit it off. For one thing, Camilla had a superb bedside manner. She didn’t speak to my mother as if she were some kind of victim; she dealt with her as an equal. When my mom couldn’t come up with a word, Camilla immediately fell into the rhythm of helping her tease it out. It was all fairly easy because my mother liked Camilla and Camilla was comfortable around my mom.

  From that point on, the four of us (Isadore was always at my mother’s side) had dinner together at least once a week and on occasion went to the movies. Several times Camilla took my mother out—in her wheelchair—to museums and galleries when I was too busy to go. My mother also took to hanging out in the clinic’s waiting room for a good chunk of the day. At any given moment it was a safe bet that you’d find the room filled with lesbian cat owners, a hypochondriacal snail (or snail owner), barking dogs, homeless pet owners receiving free treatment thanks to the scholarship money that came from a Mexican drug cartel, a Trinidadian caretaker, an obese receptionist who would occasionally burst into tears (now more frequently than ever, because Alana, Lucy’s longtime partner, had just dumped Lucy in favor of an even more obese woman, and the three of them were living in Alana’s studio apartment, which would have made me cry a lot more often than Lucy did), and an elderly stroke victim, who somehow managed to comfort them all.

  A couple of months after my mom moved in, I went upstairs to check on her during a short break between patients. Camilla had gone with her to the Morgan Library that morning to see an exhibition of rare manuscripts.

  “You like her,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  My mom nodded.

  “We liked her right from day one,” Isadore chipped in from across the room, nodding more energetically than my mother.

  I waved my hand, acknowledging her approval, then turned back to my mother. “You didn’t like Anna when you first met her, did you?”

  I wasn’t sure she’d even remember that first meeting. But, as usual, I’d underestimated her.

  “You’re right,” my mother said. “I didn’t like her that day.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “You liked her too much.”

  “What?”

  “You asked. That’s the reason.”

  “I know, but … what do you mean? Teddy used to bring all these women home, and he could barely speak in front of ’em he was so smitten and lovesick.”

  She waved her one good hand in the air, dismissing the comparison. “Teddy fell in love every day of the week,” she said.

  “And me?”

  “You were gonna fall in love once. That was it.”

  I looked at her in amazement.

  “What?” she said. “Don’t look so surprised. I was always smarter than you thought.”

  “Mom,” I said. “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  “Get me a…” She drifted away for a moment; her brow furrowed as she tried to remember something. “Goddamnit,” she said. “I hate not being able to remember words.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “You can do it.”

  “The second drawer on the left in that thing in the dining room. The second drawer on top. I need the thing to wipe my mouth.”

  “A napkin?”

  She nodded in relief, then sighed in frustration.

  I got her the napkin, watched her wipe her mouth, and waited.

  Finally, she said, “I thought she’d break your heart.”

  “From the moment you met her?”

  She nodded.

  “When did you start to like her?”

  “Oh, soon after. Very soon after.”

  I smiled, teasing her. “So you admit you were wrong, huh?”

  “About what?”

  “About her breaking my heart.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I laughed now, and shook my head. “Come on. After all this time, you can’t admit you were wrong?”

  She wiped her mouth again and gave a little cough into the napkin. “Was I?” she said. “There’s still time.”

  I thought perhaps she’d gotten confused. “Mom,” I said, “we’re talking about Anna. She died. Almost ten years ago.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Then how can she still break my heart?”

  “Does this one want to get married?”

  “Camilla?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “It’s not just me.”

  “Have you asked her? Shit, what’s her name again?”

  “Camilla.”

  My mother nodded as if trying to make sure she stored the name in her brain so it would keep. “Have you asked her? Shoot. I can’t believe it. I already forgot her name.”

  “Camilla. And no. It’s too early.”

  “No, it’s not. You have that look in your eye. Not like Ted. The real look.”

  “Maybe.”

  “She has it, too.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Know so,” my mother said. She was starting to get tired; that’s when her sentences turned into fragments.

  “It’s still complicated,” I said.

  “I had … a stroke,” my mother said.

  “I know.”

  “I had stroke, not you.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “But I know … Anna’s dead.”

  “So do I. Believe me, so do I.”

  “No,” she said. “She’s still … breaking … your heart.”

  * * *

  Camilla and I were having dinner one night—sushi and sake back at our usual haunt—when she told me she had a job offer. My breath didn’t seem to want to leave my body, and then I managed to say, “Where?”

  “A doctor I knew from med school. He’s kind of my Marjorie Paws.”

  “In New York?”

  She looked at me, surprised. “Yes. In Tribeca. Is that all right?”

  “Yes. I mean … it’s not all right, it’s great.”

  “Would it make you happy if I stayed in New York?”

  I closed my eyes and breathed a long sigh of relief. “Very happy,” I told her.

  “Happy enough to tell me all the things you still haven’t told me?”

  “Cammy, there’s almost nothing I haven’t told you.”
/>
  “Almost nothing isn’t the same thing as everything, is it?”

  “When do you start the new job?”

  “In a few weeks.”

  “I’m very, very glad,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  “Shall we go back to your place and celebrate?”

  I leaned over and kissed her. Normally, any public display of affection mortified her. Holding hands was barely acceptable, tolerated only on rare occasions. Kissing in restaurants was verboten. But this time she didn’t pull away or swat at me. She kissed me back. Then we got up to leave.

  Ten minutes later, we were in front of my apartment. An ambulance and two EMT workers were standing by. I rushed over to them and asked what had happened. Before they could respond, two other EMT guys carried a stretcher out the front door. On it was a body covered by a sheet.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “After all that.”

  Cam put her hand on my neck, but even her healing touch didn’t ease the frustration and sadness that flooded through me. But what she said right after that did.

  “Bob. Your mother’s fine.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother just came out of the building.”

  Sure enough, right behind the stretcher was Isadore, wheeling my mom.

  “Then who’s this?” I said to the EMT standing next to me.

  “Florence Schmidt. Fourth floor. Heart attack.”

  And then I saw, behind Isadore, Florence’s husband, Isaac, my neighbor for the last fifteen years. He was crying, staggering a bit, not sure who or what to hold on to.

  Before I could get to him, my mother reached out with her good hand to hold one of his hands. He bowed his head as if he were in church.

  “It’s never dull around here,” Camilla whispered.

  Truer words were never spoken. A few minutes after that, we stepped inside my apartment, where, the moment I closed the door behind us, I was shocked to hear a familiar voice—deep but not quite a man’s voice—say, “Hello, Uncle Bob.”