The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  “Well, I hope, Nana, that she would respect my freedom to make up my own mind about these things.”

  “Come on,” Audrey said, clapping her hands. “Don’t be wasting your breath on Rosa. Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

  Hannah sighed. Talking about her mother had put her in a melancholy frame of mind. “What a dreadful thing, to be visiting your own child in the hospital!” she said. “You can’t imagine what it is for a mother to see her son like this.”

  “Well, it’s not easy for any of us, Nana,” Audrey said sharply.

  “When I think of him lying there all alone—”

  “He’s not alone. I’m with him almost all the time. And he has a lot of other visitors, too.”

  Hannah brightened. “Yes, Karla told me that Jesse Jackson was in the other day. He stayed for over an hour, she said. Wasn’t that nice of him?”

  Audrey yawned. “Jesse’s all right,” she conceded. “He does bang on a bit, though.”

  Hannah’s expression suggested some impatience with this refusal to be impressed by famous politicians. “Still,” she said, reverting to her previous subject, “it’s not right for Joel to be sick when I am well. I’m the one who should be in a hospital bed. I’ve had my time.”

  “Oh, Nana,” Rosa protested.

  Audrey, who rather thought her mother-in-law had a point, remained silent.

  One of the patients at Joel’s rehab clinic was celebrating a birthday this afternoon. Several forlorn bouquets of helium balloons had been taped to the walls of the main ward, and a frayed plastic happy birthday banner was hanging in a limp crescent from the ceiling above the nurses’ station. As Audrey and Hannah passed the ward recreation room, they caught a glimpse of the glassy-eyed birthday boy propped up in a chair with a paper crown planted tipsily on his lolling head. Three nurses were standing over him, trying vainly to interest him in his cake. Audrey grimaced and picked up her pace.

  Just as they arrived at the door to Joel’s room, she spotted Joel’s neurologist, Dr. Krauss, standing at the water cooler at the end of the hall. She hastily deposited Hannah at Joel’s bedside, then went back out. “Hello!” she shouted. “Could you hang on a minute?” Krauss, pallid and lanky in a double-breasted brown suit, turned and peered at her as she trotted toward him. “Ah! Hello, Mrs. Litvinoff.”

  “I’ve been trying to get a meeting with you for the last ten days,” Audrey said.

  “Really?” Dr. Krauss drank back his water and bent down to get some more. “That’s not good. You can always phone my office and make an appointment, you know.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about what’s going on with my husband.”

  “Of course.” Dr Krauss had overfilled his little paper cone. He held it at arm’s length to avoid spilling water on his shoes. “I’m afraid this is not a good time, though—”

  “I’m concerned about the care Joel’s getting.”

  “The thing to do is to make an appointment.”

  “He’s been here for two weeks, and nothing’s happening.”

  “My secretary’s name is Pam. If you give her a call—”

  “I want to talk to you now.”

  Dr. Krauss laughed like a department-store Santa. Ho ho ho. “Well. What exactly is your concern, Mrs. Litvinoff?”

  “I don’t think Joel’s getting enough treatment. I’m in here all the time, and mostly he’s just lying there like a lox.”

  “I believe that Joel is on a pretty rigorous schedule of physical therapy—”

  “Yeah, but it’s not enough. What about the treatments I’ve been reading about on the Internet—sensory stimulation, G-therapy? How come he’s not getting any of that?”

  Dr. Krauss closed his eyes, as if weary at the thought of trying to bridge the vast gap of knowledge that lay between him and Audrey. “Well, you know, Mrs. Litvinoff, a great many of the so-called therapies out there have little or no basis in science.”

  “I saw this article the other day about some doctor—not a quack, a real doctor—who’s been getting coma patients to start communicating by implanting electrodes in their brain—”

  “Yes, that is fascinating stuff, isn’t it? But I think you’ll find that those patients were at least minimally responsive prior to treatment—”

  Audrey shook her head impatiently. “It just doesn’t seem to me that you’re trying as hard as you could with Joel.”

  “I can assure you,” Dr. Krauss said, growing pink, “that is not the case. In fact, I challenge you to find a facility in America that would be willing to offer Joel a more aggressive course of therapy than the one we are pursuing.” He made a jutting, chickenlike movement with his neck as he loosened his tie. “It’s important,” he went on, “that we place appropriate parameters around our expectations.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Joel is not a young man. He has suffered a very major insult to his brain—”

  “I’m aware of that,” Audrey interrupted. “Dr. Sussman says no one knows for sure what Joel’s progress is going to be. He says the window for improvement is at least a year, and until that window closes, the sky’s the limit.”

  “Ye-e-s…” Dr. Krauss seemed to be considering how to contradict a colleague without appearing to contradict a colleague. “Strictly speaking, what Dr. Sussman says is correct. We can’t be absolutely sure what is going to happen to Joel, but we can make some intelligent guesses based on precedent.” He paused. “You know, this really isn’t an appropriate setting for this conversation. I would much prefer to discuss Joel’s situation in my office when I have more time.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Dr. Krauss gave a heavy sigh. “Joel is in a vegetative state. Every day he remains in this condition, the chances of his ever regaining an acceptable quality of life grow slimmer. I know that you have expressed strong resistance to signing a DNR order for your husband, but most families in cases like Joel’s do see the wisdom of—”

  Throughout this small speech, Audrey’s eyes had been growing steadily more protuberant. Now they threatened to depart their sockets altogether. “What’s the matter with you?” she shouted. “Were you not in medical school the day they took the Hippocratic oath?”

  “Mrs. Litvinoff, I must—”

  “Oh—” Audrey made an awkward flailing gesture. “Go fuck yourself, would you?”

  As she walked back up the corridor, she rubbed at her smarting eyes with her knuckles, like a child. She was going to report that creep to the medical council. She was going to have his bony arse fired. She clenched her fists, making angry crescent-shaped impressions on her palms with her fingernails.

  In Joel’s room, Hannah was leaning against the plastic rails of the bed, talking to her son. Audrey paused on the threshold, watching motes of dust drift lazily through the room’s muted gray light, listening to the pacific murmur of her mother-in-law’s one-sided conversation. Presently she went over and joined her. Every day, it seemed to Audrey, the essence of her husband—the Joelness of him—was receding a little farther. In addition to the EKG wires attached to his chest and the catheter line in his bladder, he was now sporting a trach line in his neck, a PEG line in his gut, and an intracranial pressure monitor embedded in his skull. Soon, she thought, he would disappear altogether beneath this welter of life-preserving gadgetry.

  At the edges of her fury with the doctor, there was an embarrassed awareness of her own hypocrisy. She and Joel had never been sentimentalists about death. Over the years, their discussions about their own mortality had always been showily phlegmatic. “When the day comes that I can’t take a piss on my own,” Joel had told her a few years back when he started having trouble with his prostate, “I want you to have me chopped up for horsemeat, okay?” How often had they shaken their heads ruefully at the dotty sanctity-of-life types who insisted on keeping their loved ones alive when they were no more sensate than parsnips? How often had they congratulated themselves on the fact that, as atheists, they were
uniquely well equipped to face the end of life with dignity? “We’ve got nothing to be scared about,” Joel always said. “We know there’s nothing else.”

  Yet now that the discussion had departed the comfortable realm of dinner-table posturing—now that she was confronting the possibility of actually presiding over her husband’s death—she understood how cowardly their former bravado had been. All those jokes about not wasting public health resources, and suffocating one another with plastic bags—what had they really been but avoidance? Refusal to confront the horror of extinction?

  She reached over now and tried to stroke his hand through its awkward anticontracture brace. She had always loved Joel’s hands: the dry, fleshy palms, the long, knotted fingers. His touch, she used to joke, was his secret weapon, the balm for all marital resentments.

  She remembered the day, thirty-four years ago, that he had come to see her in the Mount Sinai maternity ward after she had given birth to Karla. The baby had been delivered by emergency C-section the night before, while Joel was still trying frantically to get back from fogbound Boston. By the time he finally came bursting through the doors, she had been lying alone in her hospital bed for twelve hours. She watched resentfully as he danced about the ward, setting the nurses atwitter with his charm, serenading the baby with “Soliloquy” from Carousel.

  My little girl,

  Pink and white

  As peaches and cream is she.

  My little girl

  Is half again as bright

  As girls are meant to be!

  “Thanks for showing up,” she had muttered, when at last he handed the baby back to the nurses and they were left alone.

  “Aww, my poor honey.” Joel pulled the curtains around the bed and climbed in next to her.

  “You’re such a bastard, leaving me to do this alone.”

  “I tried to get back, sweetie—”

  “You shouldn’t have gone in the first place! You’re not meant to bugger off to Boston when your wife is nine months pregnant.”

  “Sweetie…” Beneath the sheets his hands roamed over her swollen, fizzing breasts, across her bandaged belly wound, down to the swampy mess between her legs.

  “Oh, I’m disgusting right now,” she muttered. “Everything’s oozing.”

  Joel didn’t care. He had none of the usual male queasiness about female biology. He loved all of her body, even its secretions.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I really am. Did it hurt very much when they cut you?”

  “Not really,” she admitted. “It felt like someone rummaging around in my sock drawer.”

  He laughed. “Brave girl.”

  He began to sing the song from Carousel again, but softly, this time, just for her.

  Dozens of boys pursue her,

  Many a likely lad

  Does what he can to woo her

  From her faithful dad.

  Pink and white young fellers of two or three—

  But my little girl

  Gets hungry ev’ry night

  And she comes home to me…

  “Jesus,” he whispered after a while. He put her hand on his groin. “How long before we can fuck again?”

  Later that afternoon, as Audrey was parking the car back at home, she spotted Jean crossing the street toward her. “Hello, dear!” Jean called. “What excellent timing!”

  Audrey had quite forgotten that Jean was meant to be coming by. She glanced unhappily at her friend’s high-waisted frumpy-schoolteacher jeans and red beret. She often felt self-conscious in public with Jean. The contrast between their two figures—Jean, towering and wide-hipped, she, short and skinny—made them a comical couple, she feared. And then—thanks to Jean’s odd, mannish getups—there was always the discomfiting possibility that people would mistake them for lesbians.

  “Isn’t it a gorgeous evening?” Jean said. She was pointing west toward the Hudson River. The sun, swaddled in luminous orange and pink cloudbanks, had begun to set over Jersey City, and all along the divider of the West Side Highway, spindly young trees in metal calipers were wagging their frothy blossoms at the passing traffic. Audrey smiled. Long ago, when she had first come to New York, she had been too absorbed by the city’s dark melodrama to notice pockets of prettiness like this. Back then, the allure of the city had lain entirely in its capacity to intimidate her—in its steaming black streets and dank subways. But the noirish metropolis of her youth had softened and shrunk with use: now, forty years on, it had become a place of sunsets and magnolia trees.

  The two women began to walk, holding their heads up to catch the last tepid rays of sun on their faces.

  “How were things at the hospital?” Jean asked.

  “Fine. Rosa buggered off, so I had to get Hannah to the hospital and back on my own.” Audrey did not want to tell Jean about her run-in with Dr. Krauss. If Jean did not share her outrage—if Jean thought that the doctor had a point—she wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  From the other end of the street, a tall, middle-aged black woman was approaching. Her long, graying dreadlocks were gathered in a ponytail, and she was carrying a backpack that thudded up and down in time with her steps. Audrey had a sense that she knew her from somewhere, but they passed each other without any greeting being spoken.

  Outside her house, Audrey took her keys from her bag, wondering idly if she had any milk in the house for tea. As she and Jean climbed the stairs, she glimpsed the dreadlocked woman returning down the street. Perhaps she was lost, Audrey thought.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said. “Audrey?”

  Audrey turned around.

  The woman was standing at the foot of the steps, wriggling clumsily out of her backpack. “My name is Berenice Mason. I wondered if I might have a word.”

  “What about?”

  The woman hesitated. “About your husband. About Joel.”

  “Yes?” Audrey spotted a menu flyer stuck between the front door and the hall mat. She squatted down to remove it.

  “I’d prefer not to go into it out here,” the woman said. “It’s a little delicate. Could I come in for a minute?”

  Audrey cast Jean a sardonic glance. A little delicate. The woman had surely rehearsed that prissy phrase.

  “Are you a reporter?” Jean asked.

  The woman shook her head. “Oh, no.”

  Audrey stood up and studied her. She was a big woman with heavy breasts, dressed, a little inappropriately for her age, Audrey thought, in a long, purple skirt and running shoes. “So how do you know Joel, then?” she asked.

  The woman smiled. “I’m a friend. A good friend.”

  “Really?” Audrey said. She had identified the woman now. She was a fan. A camp follower. One or two such lost souls turned up at Perry Street every year, hoping to establish—or imagining that there already existed—some special relationship with Joel, their radical hero. They were pitiful creatures for the most part, but it never did to indulge them. Beneath their cringing manner, there usually lurked a steely resolve.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she said briskly, “but I don’t have time to talk at the moment. Joel’s not here, and I’m very busy.” She turned to go into the house. “Come on, Jean.”

  The woman began walking up the steps.

  “Excuse me,” Audrey said, turning around again. “I just told you, Joel isn’t here.”

  “I know that,” the woman said. “It’s you I need to talk to.”

  “Right. Well, another time—”

  The woman reached into her backpack and pulled out a photograph.

  “Really,” Audrey said, “I’m not—”

  “Look!” The woman thrust the photograph at her.

  Audrey gave in and took it.

  The picture showed the woman sitting on a blanket in a park, with a baby on her lap. Squatting behind her, with his hands on her shoulders, was Joel. His hair was standing in vertical white wisps on his head like a cirrus cloud.

  It must have been taken at a rally of some sort, Audrey tho
ught. People often asked Joel to pose for photographs at such events, and Joel, not a man who had ever felt unduly burdened by his celebrity, always obliged.

  “Look, Jean,” Audrey said. “Isn’t this nice?”

  Jean smiled. “Lovely.”

  “Thanks for letting me see this,” Audrey said, turning back to the woman. “I’m afraid I really do have to go in now.” She held out the photograph.

  “Wait,” the woman said, “you don’t understand—”

  “That’s enough.” Audrey pressed the photograph into the woman’s chest. “Take this. You need to leave me alone.”

  The photograph fluttered to the ground. Audrey opened the door and went into the house, pulling Jean after her.

  “Please!” the woman cried, as the door slammed.

  Audrey drew the bolt. “That’s it! I’m calling the police! Jean, get me the phone.”

  Jean ran into the kitchen.

  “If you don’t leave immediately,” Audrey shouted through the door. “I’m going to start dialing!”

  There was no answer. Audrey went into the front room and peered out of the window. There was no sign of the woman. Across the street, a tortoiseshell cat lay on a stoop, taking a sunbath. Two men walked past the house, holding hands and laughing about something. Audrey stared after them for a moment, listening as the hoots of their laughter faded.

  “It’s all right,” she said, when Jean appeared, holding the cordless phone. “She’s gone.”

  “Well,” Jean said, following Audrey into the kitchen, “that was most unpleasant.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Audrey said. She was feeling sheepish now about having threatened to call 911. She and Joel had always maintained that privileged white people should not seek the assistance of the police, except in cases of direst emergency.

  “What do you think she was after?” Jean asked.

  “Oh, who knows? She probably doesn’t know. She’s a nutcase, isn’t she—” Audrey broke off suddenly. “Oh, God.”