The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  Duncan takes Greta dancing as Ellen advised. Ellen and Theo come along as Ellen promised.

  Except for the stage, where a band is immersed in golden light, the bar is dimly lit. Duncan keeps time with his wife on the crowded dance floor. He is worried that he will fall and give away his condition, and yet he’s enjoying himself. Greta used to make fun of his dancing when they were dating. “How can a musician have no rhythm?” she’d say. The memory adds to his pleasure. He loves the way his wife dances, the large and fine movements of her body, even her mouth, puckering and grimacing with the beat. He stomps a little to make his awkward shuffle seem intentional, but it leaves him unstable. Greta bumps him as she does a spin, and his body tips like a great timber.

  Yet he doesn’t fall. Theo and Ellen have been dancing beside them all night. Theo’s hands grip him, balance him, and let him go. Greta doesn’t see a thing.

  He understands he will not dance again. This is his last night for dancing. When the song ends, Theo pretends to be tired and takes his arm.

  “You gals dance together,” Theo says. “We want to drink.”

  Theo was the first to know. He noticed something in Duncan’s golf swing, convinced him to see a doctor. Probably he told Ellen right away. What else would explain her reaction at the house? It can be hard not to tell your wife everything. Immediately he amends the thought. Some things are easier not to say.

  They sit beside each other at the table, drinking and watching their wives. When the band announces its last number, Duncan is drunk enough to ask. He takes Theo by the arm.

  “When did you tell Ellen about me?”

  Theo sighs and shakes his head wearily. “I can’t keep a damn thing from her.”

  Duncan smiles, nods. He has another question. It coils in his mouth, ready to spring out. The transfer to Florida was so abrupt, their decision to move such a surprise. He thinks it’s his illness that made up their minds. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to research the disease, how it dominates the lives around it, all the work it takes to care for a human who can no longer move. Families fall apart. Friendships dissolve.

  He holds to Theo’s arm, but he does not speak. To ask is to accuse. He prefers to believe in their friendship. He takes a long drink of beer and searches the dance floor again for his wife. He’s determined not to let his illness destroy his family. Already he’s hired a kid to do chores, build ramps. The beer is still cold and just bitter enough. His wife dances into view. She’s talking with Ellen even as they flit and shake to the music. His life swirls deliciously inside him, like the smoke in the stage lights. He merely has to keep one step ahead of the disease. That’s all.

  How hard can that be?

  On the day of Greta’s return flight, the Florida sky opens and rain pummels Ellen’s car. They leave the house hours early. Neither wants her to be late. Ellen drives incautiously, skating over street ponds, passing on the freeway ramp. But traffic grows thick and they come to a standstill.

  “There must be an accident,” Ellen says.

  “It was smart to leave early,” Greta agrees.

  Since the party, Ellen has had nothing to do with her. She stayed in bed on Saturday morning, claiming a hangover. Yet when Greta got out of the shower, she was gone. A note explained that she was at the gym. She didn’t return until lunchtime and arrived with friends. She announced in front of the others that Andrew had invited Greta to dinner. “I accepted for you,” she said casually. Greta took the hint. She had dinner with Andrew and spent the night at his apartment. A siren sounds. A patrol car passes them on the shoulder.

  “Andrew is really taken with you,” Ellen says.

  “He’s nice,” Greta replies.

  Andrew had grilled tuna on his balcony and lit candles in the bedroom. The sex wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but she enjoyed seeing his apartment. She asked him why Ellen wanted to hurt her, but he did not attempt an answer. She told him about Duncan, how he’d had rages near the end, accusing her of intentionally hurting him when she got him dressed or took him to the toilet. They went to a counselor, but they could not make the therapist understand how they felt. He used words like codependency and enabling, feeble words that did no justice to the tragedy of their lives. Greta had wished Ellen and Theo could be with them. Why shouldn’t friends go to therapy to save their happiness? But she cannot imagine sitting with Ellen and talking to a therapist. Instead, she sees them in Chicago with their husbands and children, bundled for winter, chatting about their lives.

  When the reverberation of the siren dies out, there’s only the sound of the rain.

  Ellen says, “I don’t care what you think of me.” Her voice is soft, almost apologetic. She grips the steering wheel with both hands, her knuckles turning white. “How many more chances will I have?”

  “I’m not judging you,” Greta says.

  “You met him. You could see it. He’s a cut above.”

  As far as Greta could tell, Stan was as ordinary as they came.

  “People die for love,” Ellen says. “They fight wars for love. So what if I’m willing to break up a marriage for it?”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me? Why the big story about Andrew?”

  “You made out all right there,” Ellen says. “You wound up pretty entertained by that little ruse.”

  “Oh, please stop.”

  They sit in silence. Ellen turns on the radio. An oldies station, the Turtles: I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but—Greta switches it off. The traffic begins to move.

  Finally Ellen says, “I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t have you throwing yourself at him.”

  “God damn you,” Greta says. “I hate you, you know. I really do.”

  One evening, near the end of Duncan’s truncated life, he lets it slip that he told Ellen first. Maybe he means to hurt Greta with it. Maybe he wants to turn her against her friend.

  “She wouldn’t let me tell you until she’d gone south.” He’s hard to understand, his mouth no longer fully under his control, the muscles in his body burning out one at a time. The disease encourages them to be petty, to attend to minutiae, anything to avoid the havoc of misfiring nerves, the husk of his body. It doesn’t help that their sleep is ruined. Greta has to get up if he needs to pee or merely turn on his side. She has to feed him and watch him chew. Twice a day she pours a protein drink into a tube surgically connected to his stomach. He says, “She told me to take you out while I could still dance.”

  Greta feels a wide sea of responses. She understands her friend has perhaps betrayed her. She understands her husband is looking for a fight. But this day she does not get angry. This day something else prevails.

  She says, “You could never dance.”

  He lets out a laugh. He no longer has the fine muscles to produce a smile, but he offers the skeleton’s gape.

  “Don’t I know it,” he says. “But this is ridiculous.”

  It’s a rare sweet moment, yet Greta can’t seem to convey that in the telling. Describing it to Ellen, she claims they danced, woman and wheelchair, about the cluttered house, knocking over a TV tray, Greta performing an unlikely striptease, her body undulating like a serpent’s. She claims they had sex in the living room. (Duncan still could have erections all the way to the end. What feeds desire is not muscle, evidently, but some more resilient force.) She describes to Ellen the cold arms of the wheelchair against her thighs, how she pressed his gaping face to her breasts.

  In reality, they just touch hands. He wants to hear one of the tapes from his class. She finds the cassette. The lecture is on the beautiful and mortal Medusa and her immortal sisters, who were so spectacularly ugly they could turn a man to stone. During the actual class, when Greta recorded the lecture, Duncan had asked a question. She remembers holding his hand aloft for him. He had wanted to know what became of the immortal sisters after the mortal one was slain. What did they do for the remainder of eternity? The teacher had not come up with a good answer, although Greta can’t recall exactly what he
said. On the tape, he talks about the notion of some scholars that the hideous faces of the Gorgons were representations of female genitalia. That had made Duncan laugh in class, and she can hear his laughter on the tape. Nothing about the female anatomy—about her body, anyway—was ugly to him. She puts her hand on his chest, ready to direct the afternoon toward sex after all, but he has fallen asleep in his chair.

  She clicks off the tape, noticing the creases in the carpet left by the wheelchair, a long path from where he sits to the opposite end of the living room, branching off to the bedroom in one direction, the bathroom in the other, a heavy crisscrossing foliate crown. She gets out the vacuum to erase it all.

  Greta is in a Florida airport during a rainstorm when she is wakened in her Chicago bed by the thunder of a sledgehammer. She is in Florida and she is home from Florida. She is two places at once, and she needs a drink.

  In Chicago, her pajama tee is damp with sweat. The new season has begun and the morning is warm. She changes into one of Duncan’s white shirts. She has not thrown out his shirts. In Florida, she gestures to get the bartender’s attention. The bar has a view of the airstrip and an assortment of junk on the walls—old oars and snowshoes, rusty signs for Esso Oil and RC Cola. She doesn’t care for the decor, but the weather has shelved her flight. She has time to kill. She is home and her home is changing shape. She is stranded far from home, and the distance she wishes to travel is growing.

  Her mother and daughter have ravaged the newspaper, and the coffeemaker holds a simmering carafe of her mother’s watery brew. She can’t bear her mother’s coffee without a shot of Baileys. She searches for the bottle in the liquor cabinet. The men dismantling the wooden ramps have finished out front and appear now on the back stoop, two young guys in jeans. They sweat just beyond the kitchen window. Now and again they peek in at her. The bartender leans in her direction. “What’ll do you?”

  She orders a gin and tonic. “Strong,” she says. “Mighty. A powerful drink, please.”

  “I’ll make it as strong as you can take it,” she replies, a young woman in an ugly green vest.

  Greta cannot stop thinking about the disastrous visit—the gym, the party, the whole ugly mess. She backs up to their life in Chicago, their long friendship, the parting. They had been like family. Greta’s mother fills the kitchen doorway, saying, “Sleeping Beauty rises.” The tone is disapproving. She wears a floral dressing gown, a garish and threadbare garment the kids gave her one Christmas, a display of fidelity wasted on Greta’s daughter, and if her son were home, it would be wasted on him, as well. Her children are sweet but inattentive and self-absorbed like almost everyone their age.

  “So?” her mother says. “Did you have yourself a time?”

  Greta shrugs as she grabs the Baileys. “It was pleasant.”

  Her date the night before had been with an attractive stockbroker who means nothing to her. They ate dinner in the Palmer House ballroom. The occasion included a jazz band and speeches by politicians and actors—a fund-raiser for an obscure malady. Afterward, they had drinks and sex and a drive in his convertible. With her mother at the house, Greta could have spent the night with him. She had no responsibilities calling her home, and she’d been only mildly bored—a gentle, yielding brand of boredom she was coming to appreciate.

  She chooses a cup for her coffee and Irish cream, and tells her mother about the celebrities in the audience, their clothing, the courses of food, the alderman who shared their table. She enjoys the night more in retrospect than she had while she lived it.

  “Hair of the dog?” her mother asks, eyeing the bottle.

  Greta finishes pouring the Baileys. “You can call it that.”

  The back door opens. One of the workers nods a greeting, taking in her bare legs. He holds a sledgehammer. “We’re about to get serious out back. Thought I ought to warn you.” He offers an abbreviated wave, two fingers flicking. Lightning divides the sky over the runway. Greta observes it through the bar’s wide window, a brilliant forking flash, followed by a tremendous percussive slap. The lights shut down. The room turns the gray of the sky. The girl in the vest rolls her eyes as she gives Greta the drink. “This always happens. The control tower has a generator. There are emergency lights in the halls.”

  “The bars are on their own?” Greta says.

  “You got it.”

  The tonic is flat. She barely tastes the gin, but she’s happy for the dim room, the quiet, the time to think. The bond she shared with Ellen was physical, a belief in the bodies of children and men, a faith that resided in their own flesh. She cannot keep her friend without her family. For that matter, Ellen could not keep her marriage without Greta and Duncan. They had all come together in a complex harmony, and now they can’t help but attend to everything that is missing. Is there a word for this kind of loss? She’s acquainted with the grief of losing her husband, the shame of deciding to leave him, the guilt from knowing how he died. What’s the word for losing a dear friend? She tries to find one with the right sound and texture. She can almost feel it on her tongue.

  A man on the next stool speaks to her, “Buy you a drink?” She hadn’t noticed him, though he’s in pilot’s uniform. His cap is on the bar and he’s touching the emblem—white wings—with his thumb, as if to wipe it clean. His eyes are appraising and curious. Smiling, he adds, “I get a discount.”

  She declines his offer. “I just want to be left alone.”

  “There’s a wish,” he says. He jostles her stool as he stands. She lifts her G&T to keep it from spilling. The transparent liquid rocks in its transparent container. One of the men dismantling the ramps—the same one as before—pushes open the door again. She has moved her chair into the sun, her feet up on the windowsill, and the door nudges her chair. “Sorry,” he says, his eyes steering themselves along her legs to her thighs. The second man wedges his face into the space between the jamb and the door. The two heads in the opening look connected, like a mythological creature.

  “Something wrong?” she asks.

  She removes her feet from the window ledge and the men enter. They want water. Greta fetches cups and ice. It’s only when she’s handing over the drinks that she realizes one of them is a woman—hipless and flat-chested but undeniably female. She is silent while the man talks about the assembly and heft of the ramps, their sturdy design, the clever interlocking parts.

  “They’re impressive,” he says, “like building blocks.”

  “My husband was an architect,” Greta tells him, but she cannot explain why the pieces are nailed together so haphazardly they have to be sledged apart. “I’d have removed them earlier but my son used to skateboard on them. He’s in college now.”

  “You have a son in college?” he says.

  Even as she smiles, she recognizes the tedium she felt the night before. It seems this will be the dominant feeling in her life, this somewhat gratifying monotony, like a boring song played especially for her.

  “I guess we ought to get back to it,” he says.

  The woman never says a word.

  The pounding resumes. Her mother has abdicated the kitchen. Her daughter is upstairs in her room supposedly conjugating French verbs. Greta experiences a vague sense of desolation and gloom despite the brilliant sun on her skin. She doesn’t let it affect her too much. The coffee is bad, even with liquor in it, but otherwise what does she have to fret about? Some feelings exist to be ignored. Just beyond her window, the man and woman examine a crowbar. They are siblings, she decides. She wonders whether they notice the gouges where Duncan’s wheelchair skated off the ramp.

  Meanwhile, out front, a car slows as it approaches. AJ drives by the house every weekend. He’s in college now and barely passing his classes, but he likes the campus, the grass, the paths between buildings. He feels better about the course work from week to week. He can almost see himself as a college student. He can almost see himself as something he already is. On his way over, he drove past the house where the great tree had stood. He
cannot count the times he has seen the snake in his dreams. It doesn’t bother him now as it used to. It bothers him in a new way. Which must be a kind of progress, he reasons. The sections of the ramp he built have been separated and removed from the steps. They’re stacked on the driveway.

  AJ understands that Duncan is dead.

  He would like to take those sections of the ramp home. There must be a use for the lumber. He doesn’t want to see it wasted. This is the reason he gives himself for parking the car and walking to the front door of Greta’s house.

  In the dim airport bar, she pulls again at the thread of her reasoning. What she comes up with makes sense to her, even if she cannot find the right label for it. When she and Ellen are together now, they feel diminished and nostalgic, like the members of any group who regret their solo careers. And that is what’s left for each of them now: a solo career. Greta’s husband is dead, her son is in college, her daughter will soon follow. She’ll have friends, but none like Ellen. She’ll see men. Maybe she’ll marry one. But none will have the presence in her life that Duncan had. None will have the gravity. Her life is thinning, tapering. She takes up no space in the world, so light that the slightest breeze will stir her. Even grief will give up its hold, and she will be like the children who mocked their sorrow by jumping from the bridge that spanned nothing at all.

  Thinking this through does not make her happy, and yet she is pleased to figure it out. She would like to tell someone about it.

  A long mirror backs the bar. People hunch over their drinks. Strangers stuck in a terminal, everyone waiting to be somewhere else. There is no one here for her to talk to.

  It is Greta’s mother who answers the door, but AJ doesn’t know this. She is a woman who looks like Greta but far older than he remembers. Time, he understands, is tricky. You think it runs downhill like water, like a great wide river. But time is no river. It shoots up from a central source, but it isn’t one thing, it’s many things that fork and fork again, and you find yourself almost grown one moment and a child at the same time. The minute he spent with the snake seems like less than yesterday, and the hours he worked as Duncan’s hands seem now ages ago.