Now that he could give them their account number (sotto voce, as sotto as he could make it and still be heard, so sotto, in fact, that he sounded suspicious even to himself), the bank was nice as pie. Too nice, you asked him. He could have been anyone. He was upset with them that they’d just hand out information like that. He even thought he recognized the voice, that it belonged to the religious zealot he’d spoken to earlier. Now here it was again, giving out inside info on him like there was no tomorrow. Taking his substance in vain. Which, even in his pique, he was pleased to learn Claire had made no inroads on. He called their other banks, the one where they did their checking, the one used for the trust-fund account.
Which couldn’t have been more cooperative, sir, pleased to provide him with that information, sir, yes sir, connected with an employee who might, Schiff felt, had he only asked for them, have called out the intimate weights and measures of anyone who’d ever done business with the bank, not only to the last penny but right down to the last overdraft, the last bounced check. Not only was money fungible, apparently an account number, any account number was too, or maybe just any five random digits, like figures on a Bingo card. He felt like a government agency. He felt like a car dealer, Jack Schiff Oldsmobile, say, calling for the lowdown on a would-be customer.
He probably wouldn’t have felt this way (or felt anything more than a little surprised) if just at that moment, the very moment when the bank’s teller, or clerk, or paid professional informer, was singing out Schiff’s bottom lines, bright, clear, and brassy as a belter on Broadway stopping the show, someone somewhere in the house hadn’t picked up an extension.
The cooperative teller asked if Schiff had gotten that and, before he could answer, broke down the sums for him again.
“Oh,” said Miss Simmons, “is that you, Professor? I didn’t know you were still making your calls.”
“I got a wrong number,” he said, and disengaged.
The three of them were downstairs.
“Yep,” Bill was saying, rubbing his hands, “you got it right the first time. Turns out we didn’t really have to check. We could almost go with the plan we specified on the telephone. Jenny found one or two places the signal may have to be reinforced, but you could do a voice level, she’ll meter you and, who knows, you might just be able to get away without us having to change a thing in the original specs. Even if we do have to make an adjustment it wouldn’t run you more than an additional two or three hundred dollars.”
“I have to go upstairs?”
“No, no,” Bill said, “she marked off the distances. You can do the reading right down here, can’t you, Jenny?”
“Sure,” said his former student. She took something that looked rather like a light meter from one of the deep pockets in her coveralls and held it up. “Go ahead,” she said, “pretend you’ve fallen. Just speak into the air.”
“What should I say?”
“Anything. I’m just getting a level.”
“Calling all cars,” Schiff said in a normal voice. “S.O.S. S.O.S. Save our Schiff.”
“What do you think, Jen?” Bill said.
His former student looked at her old professor whose worth she knew—as a teacher, as a husband—she looked at his weakened limbs, may even, when she was upstairs, have seen his urinal—as a man.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Is it?” said Bill, surprised. “How about that?” he said. “You got it right the first time, but then that’s your business, isn’t it, Professor? Floor plans, knowing the territory.”
In spite of himself, Schiff basked in what, in spite of himself, Schiff knew wasn’t really a compliment. But he did, he did know the territory.
“Yep,” Bill said, “Jenny tells me you used to be some kind of geography professor.”
“I still am,” Schiff said, “I still teach.”
“Do you?” Bill said. “Well, good for you.”
He knew the territory, all right. He should have thrown the S.O.S. s.o.b. out of the house. He told himself it was only because Claire had left him and he needed the service that he didn’t. But it was because of what Claire had said, too. His fear of tradesmen, of almost anyone who didn’t teach at a university. At least a little it was. So he knew the territory.
“Well,” said Bill, “all we have to do now is a little paperwork, fill out a few forms.”
He was asked questions about his medical history, stuff out of left field. Not just about his neurology but about childhood diseases, allergies, even whether he’d ever had poison ivy. He listed his medications. It was for show, not for blow, but again, and still in spite of himself, he took a certain pleasure in this medical inventory. It was the first time in years anyone had taken such an interest in him, even a faked one. Bill was more thorough than any of his physicians, and Miss Simmons seemed to hang on his answers as much as the salesman.
“That should about do it,” Bill said.
“Oh,” said Schiff, a little let down.
“Well, except for a few housekeeping details the corporation has to have for its files. Nothing GMAC or any financial institution wouldn’t need to know if you were applying for a loan on a car.”
Schiff couldn’t have said why he was so steamed. He’d expected it. Wasn’t this the reason he’d been trying to get through to his banks? Wasn’t it why he’d attempted to be so circumspect?
“Will you be paying by check?”
“Yes,” Schiff said, thrown off, expecting some such, but not exactly this, question. “The corporation takes checks, doesn’t it?”
“These systems are fairly big-ticket items. It takes cashier’s checks.”
“Well, that poses a problem, doesn’t it?” Schiff said. “Me being crippled and all? My wife having lit out for the territory and leaving me up shit creek without a paddle with a car in the driveway to get to the bank but not quite enough strength in my legs to press down on the accelerator let alone the brake pedal?”
“Don’t get so excited,” Bill said. “We’re flexible. We’ll work with you. Hey,” he said, “we’re nothing if not flexible. If you can demonstrate you have enough money in your account to cover the check, we’ll work with you.”
“Ask Miss Simmons if I have enough money in my account to cover it,” Schiff said.
“No offense, old man,” the salesman said. “Hey,” he said, “take it easy. No offense. Often, a spouse quits on a partner who’s been dealt a bad hand she Hoovers out their joint accounts before she goes.”
“This happens?” Schiff, oddly moved, said suddenly, in spite of himself, interested, narrowly studying the man, a sort of political geographer in his own right, a kind of bellwether, some sibyl of the vicissitudes.
“Well, a lot of resentment builds up,” Bill explained. “I mean, put yourself in her place. At least some of the trouble between you had to have been physical, right?”
Schiff stared at him.
“Sure,” Bill said, “and it’s my guess that until you were struck down you two probably had it pretty good in bed together. Go ahead, write the check. It’s the amount we agreed on. You’re good for it.”
“Am I?”
“Well, sure you are,” Bill said. “She ever have to lift you up off the floor?”
“Yes,” Schiff said stiffly.
“She ever have to carry you?”
“Once in a while,” he said.
Bill clucked his tongue. “You enjoy that? You come to enjoy that?”
“Well,” Schiff said evasively.
“Well, sure you did,” Bill said.
“I didn’t want her to hurt herself.”
“Of course not,” Bill said.
“She’s pretty strong, but let’s face it, she’s no spring chicken.”
“Let’s face it,” Bill said.
“I don’t have my checkbook.”
“Want me to go get it? Want Jen to?”
“I think it may be in one of the drawers in the tchtchk.”
“Say what?
”
“The cabinet in the hall. We call it the tchtchk.”
“That’s a new one on me. You ever hear that, Jen? The choo-choo? Heck, I can’t even pronounce it. How do you say that again?”
“Tchtchk. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Just a pet name, eh? From your salad days.”
“I guess.”
“Well, sure,” Bill said. “It’s just something you ought to bear in mind.” Schiff didn’t follow. “Well, that you had salad days,” Bill said.
“Oh, right,” Schiff said, who didn’t need the lecture but wanted to placate the man just long enough to write the check and be rid of him.
“That’s why the good Lord usually lets us hold on to our memories,” Bill said. “So we can remember the times before our wives had to carry us around piggyback.”
“She never carried me around piggyback,” Schiff said.
“No? How’d she manage you?”
“She held me around my waist.”
“Off the ground?”
“Thanks,” Schiff told Jenny, “thank you.” She’s brought his checkbook. She could have brought him the one from the money-market account, even the tiny credit-union one. It was the account with money from the trust. “May I use your pen?” he asked coolly. It was hard to get a good grip on the pen with his weakened hand, difficult for him to write the check, almost impossible to form the numerals, some of which he had to trace two or three times and which were an illegible muddle when he finished. He didn’t even bother to sign it but pulled the ruined check from the book and started another. Miss Simmons looked elsewhere. Bill watched Schiff closely, bearing down on him with a knowing stare. “My small motor movements are shot,” Schiff explained. “I didn’t forget how to make out a check.”
“Of course not,” Bill said. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”
“I forgot how to ride a bicycle,” Schiff said.
“We have to keep our chin up,” Bill said. “Hey,” he said,
“I’ve got to get back to the office. Jenny still has to do the installations so I’ll leave her here with you.”
“Sure,” Schiff said.
“Watch yourself now.”
“I will.”
“Don’t fall.”
“I won’t.”
“I don’t know if Jenny could handle you,” Bill said. Schiff didn’t answer. “The service, though, the service is another story. Sometimes the service sends out women.”
Schiff had enough. “What is this?” he demanded. “What are you getting at? Just what are you hinting? Do you talk this way to all your customers?”
“Why are you so excited? Do you think it’s good for you to get so excited? I know your blood-pressure medications. I know what you have to put into your bloodstream to keep a lid on the stress. Do you think I’m against you? I’m not against you. Quite the contrary. I represent the service. Does the service stand to gain if its clients become upset with it? I know how highly you think of our advertising campaign but believe me, brother, what it finally boils down to is word-of-mouth. And, if you want to know, I wasn’t ‘hinting’ or ‘getting’ at anything. All I was referencing was man’s dependence on woman for her ability to nurture.”
“All right,” Schiff told him wearily.
“Sure,” Bill said, “that’s all there is to it. She helps him out with his motor movements. Large and small both.”
“Okay.”
“Ain’t a mother’s son of us don’t want to float around in the pool in his mama’s arms. Ain’t a joey alive don’t enjoy going for a ride in the mommy roo’s pouch. Security is the name of the game.”
Okeydokey already, Schiff thought.
“So I wasn’t suggesting anything kinky. Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the salesman said, took up the check in Schiff’s smashed handwriting, and left him in the house with Miss Simmons.
Who to this point, she told him, had only been seeing what had to be done, that now she could start to plant.
“To plant?”
“Your garden,” she said. “Lay out your seeds and bulbs for you. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a serviceman’s term in the industry.”
The professor nodded, surprised by the term “industry,” though once he thought about it, maybe not so surprised. Increasingly, he’d been noticing those ads on TV. It was some crisis of the infirm and elderly thing, high tech’s interim arrangement with the nursing-home interests, with Medicare, the aging demographics, the death-with-dignity folks. He explained this to Miss Simmons as she laid out her tools, set out the equipment she brought into Schiff’s home from the van.
“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.
“By which, thought Schiff, she meant to assuage him, ease him, allay his fears, cut him, he meant, from the herd of the infirm, aging and elderly, anyone struggling for a few last breaths of dignity. Because it was true what the salesman had said. Women were nurturers, even women like this one. Beneath her repair or maintenance man’s gray union suit, this person who worked in the basement down with the pipes, boilers, and boards of circuit breakers, was probably just another bleeding-heart nurturer and enabler.
And my God, Schiff thought, I wasn’t even fishing. Though maybe, he thought, all he ever did now was fish, his condition, his very appearance these days a fishing expedition, searching out reassurance like a guy on a treasure hunt. (Appalled by his letters of credit, his devastating carte blanche entree like some terminal kid’s on a trip to Disney World. Appalled, too, by what he must have done to Claire, who’d abandoned him, forcing her against her nature by the cumulative, oppressive weight of his need.) Shit, he thought, I am what I am, and asked a question that had been at least somewhere on his mind since she’d told him he’d been her professor.
“I’ve been trying to think,” Schiff said, “was I still on a cane when you were my student?”
“A cane?” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember any cane. No,” she said, “you walked like everyone else.”
“That had to be at least a dozen years ago.”
“I graduated it’ll be fifteen years this June.”
“You knew me when,” Schiff said.
“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.
“I knew you when,” he said.
Miss Simmons looked down at her wrenches and scissors and rolls of duct tape, at all the instruments he did not have names for. She appeared to blush, though women were clever, he thought. Blushing and downcast eyes could be a sort of nurturing, too. Outright flirting could. How could men trust a sex that lived so much by its inborns and instincts, that stood so firm by the agenda of its drives and temperament (anything for the cause), its goals and nature? Christ, he thought, they might just as well have been critters, low and furious on the biological scale as spawning salmon. (Giving another passing, glancing, bruising thought to what he must have done—his disease must have done—to his own wife’s damaged intrinsics and basics.) And, quite suddenly suspecting she may have thought he was coming on, momentarily panicked.
“Oh, no,” he said, finding his place again in the lecture she probably hadn’t even recognized was one, “I’m all for it. I believe it’s exactly the thing, quite the right way to go. I mean after the initial outlay it’s rather economical. And Bill is right, a sense of security is the name of the game.”
“Well,” she said, gathering up some pieces of equipment and rising, “this is going to take at least a couple of hours. I’m afraid I have to tie up your phones; you won’t be able to use them till I’m done. If there are any calls you have to make you ought to try to make them now. Otherwise…”
“What if someone was trying to reach me?”
“Well, they’d get a busy signal.”
“At least two hours, you said. No one talks on a phone two hours. They’d think something was wrong, that I’d had an accident. Well,” he said, “they could call the operator, I suppose, ask her to check to see if the line really was engaged.”
“That’s right,” Miss
Simmons said.
“I think of all the contingencies,” Schiff somewhat apologetically said.
“I see you do.”
“Occupational hazard,” he said. “Plus it has something to do with my being a gimp.”
“Oh, now.”
“No, really,” he said, “I could give you a whole song and dance about the cripple’s code. But I’d bore you silly.”
“Oh, now.”
Schiff, who still had some character left, was becoming as tired of the game as Miss Simmons.
“Really,” he said, “two hours?”
“If I get started right now.”
“I take your point,” he said, and gallantly moved his arm as if signaling her to pass, to play through.
She excused herself and disappeared from his living room.
Well, thought Schiff, reminded of sudden furious electrical storms when he was a boy on vacation with his parents in the summer bungalow they had in the country, of great howling winds and plummeting temperatures and of wide shadows that spread from horizon to horizon and came down over the bright, burning afternoon like dark paint, this is cozy. He meant it. His legs and his telephones useless, he felt stranded, shut off, closed down, all the abrupt, unexpected holiday of emergency, of every chore suspended. (He could have lived, he recalled thinking, like this forever, and remembered his disappointment when the storm passed and the world resumed.)
Miss Simmons had returned. She was screwing some tiny piece of equipment into the handset of the extension in the living room.
“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she said.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I think I may have dozed off.” It was a lie, but he did feel refreshed. He watched the efficient movement of Miss Simmons’s fingers, her accomplished cybernetics. It would be like this in a home, he thought. All the activity of the nurses, their aides, the physical and occupational therapists, the people who brought you your trays, the nimbleness with which they stripped the little lids from your jellies and butters and creamers, undid the impossible knots of Saran Wrap from around your salads and sandwiches. He wondered if he could talk the university into letting him teach his classes from his room in a home. He wondered if the laws protecting the disabled covered cases like that, if his entitlements extended to people to mark his papers for him, deliver his lectures, lead his discussions. Because otherwise, Schiff thought, the deal was off. If he had to lend anything to the process except his presence (his consciousness, he meant, his sheer witness) the spell would be broken. Because that’s what it was, all that activity—Miss Simmons’s, the nurses’ and aides’, the food servers’ and PTs’ and OTs’, as much as the sudden, explosive summer storm—had been——a spell, an enchantment, and as quickly broken. And the lines had been down then, too. (Perhaps that’s what had put him in mind.)
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