by Mary Gordon
“I lof Ni York,” he said.
“Another of your fans,” Paul said, smiling and waving. “Why don't you go over and sign his autograph book?”
Had Paul been prone to this kind of pettiness before? She couldn't remember that he had. She told herself that he must be very frightened; the ground on which he had stood so firmly all his life, all the thirty-four years of it, had proved unstable. He could never really feel safe again. She saw how terrible it must be for him, and she understood why it would make him touchy. The best thing was to pretend that he had meant it as a harmless joke; she would laugh as if it were a good joke. She kissed the top of his head.
“ Go on, Madonna, you belong to your public.” He was trying, too, to make a joke of it, and that in honor of their marriage they must both engage in this pretense.
“I lof Ni York,” the old man said. “I was there once, one time. 1952.”
“Where is your home?” Andrea asked.
“Cyprus.”
Andrea was trying to place the political situation of Cyprus; she knew it was a site of conflict but she couldn't call up the details, so she was afraid to say anything specific.
“It's a long way to New York from Cyprus,” she said.
“I had lived in Germany. I was in German army. I was deserter. That was why I was in New York: I didn't want to fight for the Germans in Korea.”
Andrea's mind spun. She couldn't get the pieces of the story to fit together. Why was he in the German army? And why would he have fled to America to avoid fighting in Korea when it was an American war?
“I'm glad you liked New York,” she said, not knowing what else to say. “Many people find it difficult.”
“I lofed the subways. Many different peoples.”
“But you have that in London too.”
“More there. Better.”
She looked at the table beside his bed. On it were arranged, in descending order, a pineapple, a papaya, a bunch of purple grapes, an apple, and two green plums.
“I see that you like fruit,” Andrea said.
“Fruit keeps me alive,” he said.
She didn't want to ask: Are you sure you want to be alive? What do you live for? She had seen him sitting all day in his chair, tilting dangerously when he slept. Was that life? Was that so precious?
“I must get back to my husband,” she said.
“Lucky,” he said. “Lucky.” He lifted up the grapes and holding them up to the fluorescent light, he took a small bunch and put them, all of them at once, into his mouth.
When the dinner was brought around, Andrea left for her own meal. It was early; she was the only one in the Trattoria Siciliana, and her friend, the waiter whose name she didn't know and was too shy to ask, was delighted to see her.
She looked at his toupee, his sunken chest, the belly he made no attempt to suck in, and wondered about the details of his private life. He asked after her husband. He said that when her husband was well they should both come in. He said to be sure to come back tomorrow. Her meal cost less than five pounds; she waved the check gaily, as if it were a banner she was waving at a game.
“At these prices, how could I refuse?”
“Too many people thinking too many thoughts about too much money,” he said. “Come back tomorrow, early, like this, where there are not too many people.”
On the subway, she felt lonely and tired, yet proud of herself for having mastered a system that was not her own. Mrs. Romilly heard her come in and offered her a cup of tea. She sat on the wine-colored couch, looked at the dim watercolors and the stuffed birds, and cuddled the brindle-colored cat, Ivy, worried that she would not have the courage to leave when the time came and make her way up the dark stairs.
“Ivy was a stray,” Mrs. Romilly said. “Strong she was. I found her in front of a church in the Dordogne, in France, where my sister retired. I don't think they care about animals in the southern countries. Not the way we do here.”
Andrea was amused that Mrs. Romilly considered France a southern country, like Libya, or Sudan.
“A stray's more grateful, that's what I think. They don't take you for granted, like some of those snooty types.”
Andrea wondered whether, when they had children, she and Paul would get a pet. She would prefer a dog, but perhaps it would be wiser to start with a cat, as neither of them had any experience with animals.
The next morning, when she got out of the tube station, Andrea saw a beautiful display of fruit on sidewalk tables. She was drawn to the figs, purple at the base, narrowing upward and lightening toward the top, ending in a dot of yellow green. She bought three figs for her Cypriot and six for Paul. She stopped at a newsagent and bought two bars of dark chocolate— she was sure Mr. Nelson would like dark rather than milk chocolate. She bought a magazine with Nicole Kidman on the cover for Mr. Cox-Ralston. She bought the Economist for Paul and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. She bought no flowers for the old men.
They were so happy with their gifts, she wished she had thought of them sooner. Paul seemed in better humor; his parents had finally gotten through on the phone. Andrea had asked them to sort out the details of their insurance; they had determined that their American company would cover Paul's hospital stay. This cheered him enormously. He had had a shower and shaved. He loved the chrysanthemums.
“Pull the curtain,” he said, “and sit down beside me on the bed.”
He unbuttoned her shirt.
“Paul,” she said, “one of the doctors, one of the nurses could come in.”
“They've just been,” he said, and put his hand inside her bra.
“Is this all right for your health?”
“It's excellent for my health,” he said, running his thumb over her nipple.
She was embarrassed when she pulled the curtain back a few minutes later. She didn't want to face Mr. Nelson's eye.
“Do you work here?” he asked. “At this hotel?”
“No, Mr. Nelson. I'm Paul's wife. Andrea. We've met before.”
“I'm sorry, I don't remember. But I wonder if you could do me a favor. I'm expecting a visitor, an Indian sort of chap— he wears traditional clothing, and sometimes people who work in this sort of hotel are ill educated and can be quite rude. Would you make a point that Mr. Patel is a very great friend of mine and should be shown right up.”
“Of course, Mr. Nelson,” she said. His face had the same courtly intelligence it had had yesterday, or half an hour before when she'd given him the chocolate. Did it matter so much that he was confused about where he was? That he didn't remember her?
She had bought a deck of cards; she and Paul played poker but she wasn't a good player and she knew her lack of interest and skill was a disappointment to him. He took the cards out of her hands and began to play solitaire. She took out her book, Homage to Catalonia, which she had bought because of Mr. Nelson. She hoped that he would see it and that he would be himself again and that they could talk about history and politics together.
When she got to the Siciliana, it was crowded, and her friend the waiter was too busy to pay much attention to her. He asked only if her husband was better. When she said yes, he said, “Bene,” and went on to another table.
Mr. Nelson put his hand on her forearm when he passed her in the hall. “I'm terribly embarrassed about this morning. Not recognizing you.
Taking you for a stranger. Taking this for a hotel. Your husband told me what I'd done. It's very distressing. My mind goes in and out. You could say very properly that I keep losing my mind.”
She was angry at Paul for telling him. What possible good could come ofthat?
“Please don't worry, Mr. Nelson. It doesn't matter a bit.”
“You're very kind,” he said. “You must take me for an old fool.”
She wanted to say, “No, Mr. Nelson, I think you're wonderful,” but he was not American, and she knew that to say it would be wrong.
The next day was Sunday, and each of the three old men had a visitor. She had
bought chocolates for Mr. Nelson, three Seckel pears for Mr. Cas-tanopoulos and, as an afterthought, a bag of hard candies for Mr. Cox-Ralston, and another one for Paul. But when she saw that they all had guests, she was embarrassed to present her gifts, as if she were suggesting some pride of place for herself, earned by her being there with them, buying presents, when their current guests had not.
She was relieved to see that Mr. Nelson's guest was, in fact, as he had said, “an Indian sort of chap.” He was wearing traditional dress, which looked rather like ivory cotton pajamas. He wasn't a young man, but it was hard to place his age exactly; certainly he was younger than Mr. Nelson, but his toes, visible in his sandals, showed that he was no longer young.
Mr. Castanopoulos beckoned Andrea with his finger. “This my daughter,” he said. Andrea saw that she had bought her father Seckel pears. But they were more beautiful than the ones Andrea had bought, with a rosy blush at their base that absorbed itself into a sunny yellow as it moved toward the narrow tip. Andrea's were small and dun-colored; their tawny skin was speckled with light dots, like a sprinkling of cinnamon or pepper; they looked unsavory in comparison with the fleshy beauties that the daughter had brought, sitting demurely in their cups of purple tissue beside the pineapple.
“Thank you for being kind to my father,” the woman said. “I live rather far away, in Hendon, so I can't make it here as often as I'd like.” Andrea noted that her speech was unaccented, and that she was rather heavily made-up, in the way of European professional women, skirting garishness through a firm confidence in their appeal as women, unafraid that anything of importance could be lost to them by display.
“He has rather a thing about fruit,” the woman said, under her breath, and she and Andrea laughed uneasily.
“He's a charming man,” Andrea said, knowing she exaggerated. Mr. Castanopoulos was not a charming man, not like Mr. Nelson, but his story had interested her, and she was grateful for the gift of interest, of distraction, so she wasn't spending all her time thinking about Paul, worrying about their future.
She sat beside Paul, took out the candy she had bought for him, spread it on his table, and kissed his newly shaved face. He cocked his head in the direction of Mr. Cox-Ralston and his guest.
“Monty Python's come to call,” he said.
She understood what he meant. Mr. Cox-Ralston's visitor had an appearance so outlandishly comic that it was hard to believe at first that it wasn't a costume, a mask, put on for a deliberate comic effect. His hair, entirely without gray, although he appeared to be in his seventies, stood up perpendicular to his scalp in a thick alarmed brush. His cheeks seemed permanently flushed, stained a berry color, and his teeth protruded so that his face was capable of one expression only: an abashed grin that despaired of modulation. Andrea's and Paul's eyes met and they stifled giggles, pretending to embrace so they could hide their faces in each other's shoulders. Andrea savored the moment; it was the first time she'd felt really close to Paul since he'd collapsed.
Mr. Cox-Ralston proceeded upon an uninterrupted monologue: about the callousness of his daughter, who had not come to visit him, the badness of the food, the neglect of the nurses, the doctor who had had to try three times to find a vein for his IV.
“Ah, James, my little brother, how I envy you the ease of your retirement. When you left the bank, you lost merely a job; when I left the world of cinema, I lost a world.”
Andrea wanted James to say something in his own defense, but not a sound came from him; he nodded as if his brother had a perfect right to assert the superiority of his life, his loss.
“The nurse said there's a garden in the back of the hospital,” Paul said. “Shall we try to find it? So that we don't need to say our garden tour of England was a compete bust.”
“That's a wonderful idea,” Andrea said, feeling there was no place for them in the ward since the other men had visitors.
She pushed Paul in a wheelchair. The wheels needed oiling and their progress was slow. Mr. Nelson's guest caught up with them.
“I am Mr. Khan,” he said. “I am Mr. Nelson's friend. I wanted to thank you for being so kind to Bill,” he said to Andrea.
“It's my pleasure,” Andrea said. “He's a very interesting man.”
“Life has, I am afraid, not been kind to him. He was a code breaker during the War, the Second War, I mean, so he stayed here in England. He was worried that his children would not be safe here in London during the bombing so he and his wife moved them out to a little cottage they had near the Epping Forest in the outskirts of London. He and his wife stayed in Hampstead. As it turns out, the cottage was bombed and the children and the nurse were killed. The children were eight and five. Whereas Bill and his wife were perfectly safe. She died in 1960. He was, I guess, about fifty then and he just sold everything up, chucked the lot, house, job, and traveled around the world. I met him then, in India; we'd had mutual friends from my days at Cambridge. I'd trained as a chemist; most of my professional life I worked in Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden. But when I retired I found Stockholm, as a city, rather boring. Not enough cultural enrichments and it seemed to me in age what is left is the pleasures of mind and the imagination. We'd corresponded very regularly, Bill and I, and met from time to time. We came up with the plan of renting a small flat and living together. We rub along rather well, or we did until recently, and then Bill began losing track of things somewhat, and now this sepsis has set in because of an operation on his knee that went bad, but I like to think we will rub along rather well for a while longer.”
“I'm glad you have each other,” Andrea said, and worried then if that was too American a thing to say.
Mr. Khan bowed slightly and said, “I, too, am very glad. And glad for the two of you, that you have each other.” He bowed to Paul. “And I very much hope that you'll soon be feeling quite tip-top.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Paul, but in a way that indicated to the Indian man that he didn't want his company.
“I'll be running along then,” Mr. Khan said. “Don't go,” Andrea wanted to say, but she knew that Paul didn't want him.
She wheeled Paul into the garden. Up the brick wall climbed late cream-colored roses; marigolds, which had before this struck her as fussy and schoolmarmish, pleased her with their geometric pleasures now. She wanted to talk to Paul about Mr. Nelson and his eventful tragic life but she didn't know how to elicit the response she wanted from him, and she feared that the wrong response would disappoint her disproportionately. She wanted to say, “I think they're better than us, these men. I wonder if we'll be interesting to the young when we are old.”
“The doctor says they might let me out tomorrow,” Paul said. “A few days in the real world after that and then he hopes I'll be ready to fly.”
“That's wonderful, darling,” Andrea said, but to her surprise, her heart felt heavy.
“My husband may be going home from the hospital tomorrow or the day after,” she said to her friend the waiter at the Siciliana, whose name she still didn't know. She didn't want to say “in hospital,” as the British said it, and she considered that it might be more restrained to wait till the following day to tell him, when it would really be her last time there, a more appropriate time for the announcement. But she wanted to tell someone, someone who might express the regret she knew she had no right to feel. He didn't disappoint her. “Oh, but that is terrible, that I will not be seeing you again.”
“I'll send you a postcard from New York, “she said. “You must tell me your name.”
“Paolo,” he said.
“Paolo,” she repeated. “My husband's name was Paul.”
He bowed, as if the connection were important.
“It'll be splendid to have hubby with us once again,” said Mrs. Romilly “I don't think we've had such a good-looking young man with us all year. I must say, he's rather a dish, your Paul. Quite good for the morale.”
She wanted to say, “I never thought of him as particularly good-looking,” and she wondere
d what it was that had made her love him. She supposed it was his way of seeing the world, a slightly hard vision with a touch of acid that made her feel safe from ambush. But that wasn't all; it was that he took pleasure in ordinary things, in dailiness, and she had understood that most of life was ordinary, so his pleasure in it gave her hope. He was mistrustful of heroics. He had said, “I think I will have succeeded in life if when I die people say of me that I did some good and little harm.”
But now she would have liked to say to him, “I'm not sure that's enough.” But he was her husband, he would be the father of her child.
She had loved him, but she had never thought him beautiful. Not like Mr. Nelson with his fine skull and his generous, courageous mouth. But what would it have been like to live with Mr. Nelson?
She was thinking of that when she fell asleep. She dreamed of a place she knew was Scotland. She had never been to Scotland but in her dream the air was clear and rich, delightful to the lungs, the mountains were high and when snow fell on them it cast a rosy shadow.
When she got to the hospital, Paul was dressed and sitting up in his chair. The bag she had brought his things in was packed and sitting on the bed like a cadet ready for his first posting.
“I'm sprung,” he said, “We're out of here.” He stood up, twirled her around, and kissed her on the lips.
“Don't tire yourself,” she said, embarrassed that Mr. Nelson could see them.
“We've just got to wait for Morton, the head quack they call him, to sign off on me. They think it will be half an hour.”
“Let me just run down the street and get some goodbye presents.”
“Sweetie, you've done enough. And I want to be ready to fly out of here the first second we can.”
She knew she couldn't go against his wishes. His impatience was a sign of health and his health must be the thing that she most prized.
“I'll just say goodbye to everyone,” she said.
“The farewell concert… leaving the fans crying for more,” he said.