The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Outside the hospital’s main entrance, she took out a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and went over to a man standing against a pillar. “You got a light?”

  “Nope,” the man replied in the piously emphatic tones of a non-smoker.

  Audrey felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to find a tall black woman in a turban, holding out a lighter. The woman watched intently as Audrey lit her cigarette, and when Audrey made to hand the lighter back, she shook her head. “You can keep it.”

  “No, love,” Audrey protested. “It’s all right, you don’t need to do that.”

  “Really,” the woman said, smiling. “Have it. I’ve got another one in my bag.”

  Audrey looked at her suspiciously. There was something in her manner—some knowingness or unwarranted intimacy—that seemed to augur impertinent questions and unasked-for confidences. It gave her the creeps. “All right then,” she said ungraciously, slipping the lighter in her pocket. “Thanks.”

  She walked away now and sat down on a bench to make her calls. Karla, her older daughter, did not pick up. Neither did Lenny or Rosa. She left them each a purposefully oblique voice mail: “Just to let you know, something’s up with Dad. Give us a ring when you can.” Then she called the Coalition for the Homeless office to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming in. There were other people she needed to inform: Joel’s mother; her sister, Julie. But she did not feel up to dealing with all that feminine hysteria right now. She would get one of the kids to make the calls later. She put the phone away and sat quietly on the bench for a moment, taking in the insulting normalcy of the scene around her. A mother wandered past, pushing a stroller. Across the street, a man leaned out from the cab of an idling delivery truck and hissed an obscenity at a passing woman. Frowning, Audrey put out her cigarette and went back into the hospital.

  When she came out of the elevator on the fifth floor, she spotted Joel’s young colleague, Daniel Leventhal, talking intently to a nurse at the other end of the corridor. His crumpled shirttails were hanging out of his pants and he had slung his jacket over his shoulder in the glamorously insouciant style of a TV detective. The nurse to whom he was speaking was staring at him in much the same way that Virgin mothers contemplate their oversize baby Jesuses in Renaissance paintings of the Adoration.

  Audrey’s lip curled in a sardonic smile. Daniel had a gift for eliciting undignified behavior from women. She had never seen his appeal herself. She accepted the fact of his attractiveness as she accepted the existence of gravity—it was the most plausible explanation for various phenomena that would otherwise have remained mysterious—but by her own judgment, Daniel was a most unimpressive specimen. There was something affected and unmanly about him, something smarmy and callow and fundamentally unserious. If such a word had been permissible within her lexicon, she would have said that his looks were common.

  Daniel glanced up in her direction as she approached, but he made no acknowledgment of having seen her, and only when she was standing directly in front of him did he look up again. “Audrey!” he exclaimed, with a feigned quiver of surprise. Audrey sighed at this gratuitous bit of theater. Daniel was a master of furtive insult. Had he ever dared to openly disrespect her, she would have had no trouble in squashing him, but he was too wily for that. His insolence only ventured out in lightning raids, under cover of scrupulous politeness. She was about to say something tart when he raised his hand in a restraining gesture. “Sorry, Audrey, could you hang on? We’re right in the middle of something here.” Smiling, he turned his back on her and resumed his conversation with the nurse.

  Audrey stood for a moment, absorbing the shock of his impudence, before turning abruptly on her heel and walking away. The temerity of that little pissant! She and Joel had had many fierce arguments about Daniel over the years. Joel tended to dismiss all of her complaints about Daniel’s impertinence as “paranoia.” He maintained that Daniel was a brilliant young lawyer—one of the sharpest legal minds he had ever encountered. Once or twice, he had even hinted that he would like Daniel to take over his practice when he retired. Audrey, who refused to believe that her shrewd husband had miscalculated Daniel’s talents so extravagantly, accused him of keeping Daniel around only to make himself look better. He was such a vain old fucker, she claimed, that he would rather champion a mediocrity than risk being outshone by a genuinely talented young man.

  In Audrey’s absence, two large, teary women had taken up residence in the Family and Friends Lounge. One of them, it seemed, had just been informed that her husband had a cancerous tumor in his brain. “They say it’s the size of a golf ball,” she was boasting to Kate when Audrey entered.

  “Danny’s here,” Kate told Audrey. “He’s just gone to see if—”

  “Yeah, I saw him.” Audrey interrupted. “He’s down the hall, being very important and in charge with one of the nurses.”

  Kate smiled nervously.

  “I take it no one’s been in to tell us anything yet?” Audrey said.

  Kate shook her head.

  Audrey made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Bastards.”

  Presently, Daniel appeared. “Audrey. How are you?” he drawled. “I’m sorry about just now. I was trying to get to the bottom of all this.”

  “So I gathered.” Audrey said. “And what did you learn on your big fact-finding mission?”

  Alerted by the sarcasm in her voice, the brain-tumor woman and her friend rustled to attention.

  “Well,” Daniel began, “they’re pretty certain that he’s had a stroke—”

  “We know that,” Audrey said.

  “—and they’re running a bunch of tests at the moment—”

  “Right,” Audrey said. “I heard.”

  Daniel smiled at her with the twinkly forbearance of a kindly uncle handling a rambunctious niece. “They seem to think that his condition is stable now,” he went on. “But they really can’t tell us much more until they’ve finished the tests. A doctor will be in to talk to us as soon as they get the lay of the land.”

  “I see,” Audrey said slowly. “So in fact, you found out nothing.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Audrey stood up to get a magazine from the pile on the coffee table and caught Daniel rolling his eyes good-humoredly at the tumor ladies. They simpered sympathetically back at him. Audrey picked up a copy of American Baby and began flicking through an article on potty training, making little cracks of thunder as she turned the pages.

  At length, a young Chinese-American woman came into the lounge and asked to speak to the relatives of Joel Litvinoff.

  “I’m his colleague,” Daniel said, standing up and extending his hand.

  Audrey remained seated. “I’m his wife.”

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Wu. If you’d like to step into the hallway, I can tell you how he’s doing.”

  Audrey took a quick survey of the doctor: her tiny, red balloon-knot mouth, the sparkly barrettes holding her floppy hair back from her face. “Isn’t there someone more senior I could talk to?” she asked.

  The doctor gave a small, unnecessary cough into her fist. “I’m afraid not. I am the most senior person dealing with this case.”

  Audrey stood up and walked out of the room. In the corridor, Daniel produced a pad and pen from his breast pocket.

  “So, the situation is this,” the doctor said. “Joel was brought in this morning having suffered a transient ischemic attack, or what we sometimes refer to as a ‘mini-stroke.’ Unfortunately, he went on to suffer another more serious stroke while we were still in the process of trying to stabilize him. He remains unconscious at this point—”

  “What?” Audrey interrupted. “Is his brain going to be all right?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t say at this point exactly what deficits he has incurred. When we are satisfied that all his vital organs are functioning as they should, we can—”

  “What do you mean deficits?”

  “Impairments. As I say, we’re—”
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  “But you must have some idea of—”

  “Mrs. Litvinoff, we can only take this one step at a time.”

  “Tell me, has he been given anticoagulants?” Daniel asked eagerly, pen and pad at the ready.

  While he and the doctor spoke about the drugs that Joel was being given and the tests that he was undergoing, Audrey gazed down the corridor to where a workman was standing on a ladder, removing one of the white panels in the ceiling. As the panel came away, a tangle of tubes and wires spilled out, looking like cartoon innards. I didn’t get him his bialy, Audrey thought. All he wanted was a sodding bialy, and I sent him off to work with one egg inside him.

  “I believe they’ll be bringing him up shortly,” the doctor was saying. “If you could try to keep the atmosphere as calm and positive as possible, that would be a good thing.”

  Audrey turned to Daniel and Kate. “You two had better be off now.”

  “But, Audrey, I’d like to see Joel,” Daniel said.

  Audrey shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It should be just close family at this point, shouldn’t it, Doctor?”

  Dr. Wu shrugged. “Well, strictly speaking—”

  “See?” Audrey said. “Let’s not be agitating him by having a great big gang march in there.”

  Daniel seemed about to protest, but then he nodded briskly and put his pad back in his jacket pocket. “Got it,” he said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Audrey smiled sweetly, “We’ll see how he’s doing, first, shall we?”

  Daniel came disagreeably close to her now and patted her on her shoulder. “Okay, Audrey,” he whispered. “Whatever you say.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  The buoys in New York Harbor were flopping and bouncing like vaudevillians as the Staten Island Ferry plowed along on its approach to Manhattan. Out on the ferry’s upper deck, ten girls in East Harlem GirlPower T-shirts were celebrating their recent liberation from the Staten Island Children’s Museum.

  “Renee can’t swim! I’m gonna throw her over!”

  “Yeah? If I go over, you going too.”

  “You need to check your hair, Ren. You looking like a homeless person.”

  “Chanel’s spitting at the bird! Chanel, that’s mean!”

  One of the girls turned to a tall white woman who was sitting on the bench behind her. “Rosa! Are we allowed to spit?”

  Rosa Litvinoff looked up from rummaging through her handbag for her cell phone. “No,” she said irritably. She paused and glanced around the deck. Over by the railings, one of her charges was standing alone, practicing dance moves. “You gotta shake it, shake it,” she was singing in an off-key playground voice as she leaned back, limbo-style, and pumped her pelvis back and forth.

  “Chianti!” Rosa called.

  The girl did not respond.

  Chianti concerned Rosa. Over the last few months she had leaped from sweet, saucer-eyed childhood into scowling preadolescence. The braids and knee socks had vanished, replaced by jiggling breasts and cigarette breath. She no longer wanted to make fridge magnets and pipe-cleaner flowers; she wanted to show off her grimy lime green push-up bra and perform slutty dances and hang around outside the GirlPower Center with unsuitable older boys. The other girls, disguising their envy in moral alarm, reported that she gave blow jobs.

  A slim, beige-skinned man in dreadlocks came out on deck now. “You don’t want to know what those bathrooms are like,” he muttered as he sat down next to Rosa.

  “Look at that,” Rosa said, pointing. Chianti had assumed a squatting position with her palms planted on her thighs and her buttocks thrust outward. “Don’t ever fake it, fake it,” she was singing. “Be sure and make it, make it—ahuh, ahuh—goo-ood.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” Raphael said, “it’s Lil’ Kim.”

  Rosa scowled. “It’s not funny, Raphael. She’s out of control…. Chianti! Stop that now!”

  Chianti looked around. The wind had given her round face the misty, purplish sheen of a plum. “What?”

  “You don’t look cool when you dance like that, you know,” Rosa said. “You look dumb.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Chianti looked at Raphael. “Yo, Raph, how come you don’t say nothing when she starts pickin’ on me like that?”

  “Uh-uh,” Raphael said, laughing. “Don’t be trying that. I ain’t getting involved. This is between you girls.”

  Rosa turned away to pick off some strands of hair that the wind had whipped across her face. It always irritated her when Raphael lapsed into his “homie” persona with the girls. Given that he had been educated with Rosa at the Little Red Schoolhouse and that his Kenyan father held a tenured professorship at Rutgers, the attempt to pass himself off as “street” was in decidedly bad taste, she thought. But then, Raphael had always had a distressing tendency to adapt his style to suit his audience. On the few occasions that Rosa had accompanied him to gay bars, she had been mortified to observe how his behavior changed in the presence of other gay men: how he rolled his eyes like Al Jolson and addressed everyone as “child.” (“Child, that shirt is beyond”; “Child, lemme tell you, that movie is genius.”) Once or twice, she had challenged him on his opportunistic posturing, but he had never shown the slightest compunction or embarrassment. “Rosa, honey,” he would drawl, “I contain multitudes.”

  Rosa returned to delving in her bag and presently produced her phone. There were five messages waiting for her: two from her mother; three from her sister, Karla. The tinny urgency of their voices ascended with each successive call, like a scale.

  “Rosa, just to let you know, something’s up with Dad.”

  “Rosa, please, you must call.”

  “Where are you, Rosa? Call me.”

  “Rosa, hello?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Rosa. It’s about your father. Why are you not answering?”

  “Rosa!” one of the girls cried. “Chanel’s spitting again.”

  “Stop it, Chanel,” Rosa said. She turned to Raphael. “Watch them, will you? I have to call my mom.”

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Audrey demanded when she answered. Her voice was bright with anger.

  “I’ve been out with the girls. I didn’t check my phone. What’s going on?”

  “What’s that noise?”

  Rosa stood up from the bench and walked into the cabin. The roar of engine and wind gave way immediately to an almost sepulchral hush.

  Tourist couples in windbreakers sat gazing placidly out of the smudged windows at the khaki water. A smell of old cooking oil drifted down from a snack bar in the rear.

  “I’m on the Staten Island Ferry. Is something up with Dad?”

  “‘Is something up with Dad?’” her mother mimicked. “Yes, something’s up. He’s had a stroke. Two strokes. He’s at the Long Island Hospital in Brooklyn.”

  “No!”

  “He’s unconscious.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “All right, don’t get dramatic. This isn’t fucking Oprah.”

  Rosa sighed. It was a matter of something like principle with her mother that bad news be handled with a minimum of fuss. The more dreadful the event under discussion, the more insistent she was on insouciance. Joel liked to tell the story of the time, early on in their marriage, when Audrey had miscarried on the 2 train and had called Joel from a pay phone, blood coursing down her legs, to tell him that she was “feeling a bit under the weather.” Joel—not yet schooled in the art of interpreting her oracular understatements—had suggested impatiently that she take an aspirin and call him back later when he wasn’t so busy. And Audrey, being the plucky little Brit that she was, had neither protested nor complained: she had simply boarded another train and taken herself off to the St. Vincent’s ER. Rosa knew that she was meant to be impressed by this tale of her mother’s true grit, but she had never quite understood why a young woman’s refusal to ask for her husband’s help in a crisis wa
s so admirable. If the anecdote taught anything, she thought, it was the futility of her mother’s show-off stoicism.

  “I’ve been calling and calling,” Audrey was saying. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t bother to check your messages. Your selfishness amazes me.” Rosa could tell her mother had been rehearsing this outrage. The complaint flowed like a recitation. She glanced back through the porthole at the girls on deck. Their T-shirts were billowing in the wind, like festive pennants. Chianti was doing her horrid dance again.

  “Are you there, Rosa?” Audrey said.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Because I can’t be too long. I’m in the hospital. You’re not meant to use phones in here.”

  “When did this happen, Mom?”

  “I don’t have time to give you the step-by-step, Rosa. The first one was in court. The other one was, I don’t know, about ten-thirty.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “What do you mean, what do they say? They say he’s very sick.”

  “I’ll be getting in, in a few minutes,” Rosa said. “I have to take the girls back uptown, but then I’ll come straight to the hospital.”

  “Oh, that’s good of you,” her mother said. “No rush or anything…”

  “Mom—”

  “He needs a calm environment, so for Christ’s sake, don’t be making a scene when you get here.”

  “Why would I make a scene?” Rosa asked. But her mother had already hung up.

  Lenny was mooning about in the ICU corridor when Rosa arrived at the hospital.

  “Dad’s having tests,” he told her. “We saw him for a bit, but then they took him off again.”

  Rosa studied her brother’s face. “You’re not stoned, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Where’s Mom?”

  Lenny led her down the hall to where Audrey was sitting with Karla in the Family and Friends Lounge, staring forlornly at the wall. She looked like a little girl in a lost-and-found booth at the fair.

  “Hello, Mom,” Rosa said.